alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Daemons – we pivoted from building agents to cleaning up after them
For almost two years, we've been developing Charlie, a coding agent that is autonomous, cloud-based, and focused primarily on TypeScript development. During that time, the explosion in growth and development of LLMs and agents has surpassed even our initially very bullish prognosis. When we started Charlie, we were one of the only teams we knew fully relying on agents to build all of our code. We all know how that has gone — the world has caught up, but working with agents hasn't been all kittens and rainbows, especially for fast moving teams.
The one thing we've noticed over the last 3 months is that the more you use agents, the more work they create. Dozens of pull requests means older code gets out of date quickly. Documentation drifts. Dependencies become stale. Developers are so focused on pushing out new code that this crucial work falls through the cracks. That's why we pivoted away from agents and invented what we think is the necessary next step for AI powered software development.
Today, we're introducing Daemons: a new product category built for teams dealing with operational drag from agent-created output. Named after the familiar background processes from Linux, Daemons are added to your codebase by adding an .md file to your repo, and run in a set-it-and-forget-it way that will make your lives easier and accelerate any project. For teams that use Claude, Codex, Cursor, Cline, or any other agent, we think you'll really enjoy what Daemons bring to the table.
Comments
The drift detection angle is interesting. I'd be curious how you handle cases where two daemons touch related files — is there a way to declare ordering constraints in the .md file, or do they run in isolated branches?
here are a few more resources:
- example daemon files: https://github.com/charlie-labs/daemons
- reference docs: https://docs.charlielabs.ai/daemons
happy to answer questions. all feedback appreciated.
I feel like I must have missed something important, but I don't feel like I skipped anything.
It seems like everything is telling me to talk to Charlie to get setup. _How_ do I talk with Charlie?
Looks pretty interesting, will try it out and give you feedback! keep up the good work.
How would this work? One would connect it's repository to a cloud platform that would then act based on the existing daemons of the repo?
the hook model is event-driven - something happens, hook fires. daemons sound like they're proposing a different mental model where you have persistent processes that observe and react. the difference is the same as cron vs a running service. both work but the daemon approach makes sense when you need stateful observation across multiple events rather than just per-action triggers
How does this compare to OpenProse, it looks similar? https://openprose.ai/
Are the two competitive or additive?
The schedule is cute.
"Complete non-determinism for everything except the schedule it runs at."
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Looks really interesting -- quick question though: how does this differ from hooks (e.g., https://code.claude.com/docs/en/hooks)?