I work at Ramp and have always been on the “luddite” side of AI code tools. I use them but usually I’m not that impressed and a curmudgeon when I see folks ask Claude to debug something instead of just reading the code. I’m just an old(er) neckbeard at heart.
But. This tool is scarily good. I’m seeing it “1-shot” features in a fairly sizable code base and fixes with better code and accuracy than me.
An important point here is that it isnt doing a 1-shot implementation, it is iteratively solving a problem over multiple iterations, with a closed feedback loop.
Create the right agentic feedback loop and a reasoning model can perform far better through iteration than its first 1-shot attempt.
This is very human. How much code can you reliable write without any feedback? Very little. We iterate, guided by feedback (compiler, linter, executing and exploring)
We use https://devin.ai for this and it works very well. Devin has it's own virtual environment, IDE, terminal and browser. You can configure it to run your application and connect to whatever it needs. Devin can modify the app, test changes in the browser and send you a screen recording of the working feature with a PR.
This is a great writeup! Could you share more about the sandbox <-> client communication architecture? e.g., is the agent emitting events to a queue/topic, writing artifacts to object storage, and the client subscribes; or is it more direct (websocket/gRPC) from the sandbox? I’ve mostly leaned on sandbox.exec() patterns in Modal, and I’m curious what you found works best at scale.
This is a really great post - and what they've built here is very impressive.
I wonder if we're at the point where the cost of building and maintaining this yourselves (assisted with an AI Copilot) is now more effective than an off-the-shelf?
It feels like there's a LOT of moving parts here, but also it's deeply tailored to their own setup.
FWIW - I tried pointing Claude at the post and asking it to design an implementation, (like the post said to do) and it struggled - but perhaps I prompted it wrong.
I had this exact idea, I pointed Codex to it, with giving it context of our environment which is pretty complex. It is struggling, but that is because even our dev experience where I work is not great and not documented, so that would need to be lifted before I can reliably get an agent setup as well integrated as this blog post details.
This kind of project totally shows that Claude Code is nothing special, if anything it lacks a lot of features. I hope every company develops a model agnostic coding agent rather than using a one tightly controlled by one company.
Yes. I don't think that one-size-fits-all is the future of coding agents. Different companies have different requirements. I would like to build specialised test harnesses that internal coding agents could use to iterate rapidly.
Also, inevitably these AI companies will start selling out data and become part of the surveillance state, if they're not already.
Reading this article and discovering how Ramp team use Modal for sandboxed dev environment just saved us weeks of custom infra development and potentially months of headache, thanks you !
I guess we all know and „love“ how every five minutes, some breathless hipster influencer posts „This changes everything!!!“ to every new x.y.1 AI bubble increment.
But honestly? This here really is something.
I can vividly imagine how in a not too far future, there will only be two types of product companies: those that work like this, and those that don’t — and vanish.
Edit: To provide a less breathless take myself:
What I can very realistically imagine is that just like today sane and level-headed startups go „let’s first set up some decent infrastructure-as-code, a continuous delivery pipeline, and a solid testing framework, and then start building the product for good“, in the future sane and level-headed startups will go „let’s first set up some decent infrastructure-as-code, a continuous delivery pipeline, a solid testing framework, and a Ramp-style background agent — and then start building the product for good“.
Yeah I feel somewhat the same way. This looks like some serious engineering effort went into it, and it looks like there should be a way to measure its impact on developer productivity and quality of output. I'm a bit hesitant considering finance is not an industry you want to introduce security problems in, but nonetheless will be a good test of these tools.
If it really does work I expect there will be many paid and open source variants that other companies can adopt into their workflows. So I'll patiently wait for the outcomes before trying something like this, but I'm glad someone is.
If you need a queue, lpd. If you need scheduling, cron. If you need backups, tar. If you need to communicate, email and irc. If you need to remote any of those, ssh.
I work at Ramp and have always been on the “luddite” side of AI code tools. I use them but usually I’m not that impressed and a curmudgeon when I see folks ask Claude to debug something instead of just reading the code. I’m just an old(er) neckbeard at heart.
But. This tool is scarily good. I’m seeing it “1-shot” features in a fairly sizable code base and fixes with better code and accuracy than me.
An important point here is that it isnt doing a 1-shot implementation, it is iteratively solving a problem over multiple iterations, with a closed feedback loop.
Create the right agentic feedback loop and a reasoning model can perform far better through iteration than its first 1-shot attempt.
This is very human. How much code can you reliable write without any feedback? Very little. We iterate, guided by feedback (compiler, linter, executing and exploring)
These Xmas there have been a lot of converted programmers after having some free time and playing with things like Codex, Claude Code, AMP...
This basically sums up where we're at. Undeniably useful but careful in approach.
We use https://devin.ai for this and it works very well. Devin has it's own virtual environment, IDE, terminal and browser. You can configure it to run your application and connect to whatever it needs. Devin can modify the app, test changes in the browser and send you a screen recording of the working feature with a PR.
Interestingly, Devin lists Ramp (the OP) as a customer on their front page.
Surprised they need both.
This is a great writeup! Could you share more about the sandbox <-> client communication architecture? e.g., is the agent emitting events to a queue/topic, writing artifacts to object storage, and the client subscribes; or is it more direct (websocket/gRPC) from the sandbox? I’ve mostly leaned on sandbox.exec() patterns in Modal, and I’m curious what you found works best at scale.
After reading the article, I built a tool like that with sprites.dev. There's a websocket to communicate stdout and stderr to the client.
Web app submits the prompt, a sandbox starts on sprites.dev and any Claude output in the sandbox gets piped to the web app for display.
Not sure I can open source it as it's something I built for a client, but ask if you have any questions.
This is a really great post - and what they've built here is very impressive.
I wonder if we're at the point where the cost of building and maintaining this yourselves (assisted with an AI Copilot) is now more effective than an off-the-shelf?
It feels like there's a LOT of moving parts here, but also it's deeply tailored to their own setup.
FWIW - I tried pointing Claude at the post and asking it to design an implementation, (like the post said to do) and it struggled - but perhaps I prompted it wrong.
I had this exact idea, I pointed Codex to it, with giving it context of our environment which is pretty complex. It is struggling, but that is because even our dev experience where I work is not great and not documented, so that would need to be lifted before I can reliably get an agent setup as well integrated as this blog post details.
This kind of project totally shows that Claude Code is nothing special, if anything it lacks a lot of features. I hope every company develops a model agnostic coding agent rather than using a one tightly controlled by one company.
Yes. I don't think that one-size-fits-all is the future of coding agents. Different companies have different requirements. I would like to build specialised test harnesses that internal coding agents could use to iterate rapidly.
Also, inevitably these AI companies will start selling out data and become part of the surveillance state, if they're not already.
It's really a shame because anthropic had a lot of opportunity to show good will by open sourcing claude code.
Probably the best internal ai platform I've seen to date, incredible work.
Fun marketing experiment, but you basically implemented ralph wiggum in the cloud.
Claude code locally in a vm and/or with work trees will 1 shot far better without burning cloud infra cash.
I’d bet this ends up wasting more money and time than it’s worth in practice.
Reading this article and discovering how Ramp team use Modal for sandboxed dev environment just saved us weeks of custom infra development and potentially months of headache, thanks you !
And here I am trying to get 1 terminal agent to control 4-5 other terminal agents
The commitment to reducing friction is really incredible. Are they implying that any developer could recreate the system with AI from the description?
Definitely impressive. How many engineering hours did you need to build an MVP?
I built something similar after reading the blog post, based on sprites.dev.
A day of work to get the prototype working and a few hours the next day to allow multiple users to authenticate.
It's surprisingly simple.
i wonder what percentage of PRs etc is now from non eng?
the chrome extension bit is super interesting and well thought out
I guess we all know and „love“ how every five minutes, some breathless hipster influencer posts „This changes everything!!!“ to every new x.y.1 AI bubble increment.
But honestly? This here really is something.
I can vividly imagine how in a not too far future, there will only be two types of product companies: those that work like this, and those that don’t — and vanish.
Edit: To provide a less breathless take myself:
What I can very realistically imagine is that just like today sane and level-headed startups go „let’s first set up some decent infrastructure-as-code, a continuous delivery pipeline, and a solid testing framework, and then start building the product for good“, in the future sane and level-headed startups will go „let’s first set up some decent infrastructure-as-code, a continuous delivery pipeline, a solid testing framework, and a Ramp-style background agent — and then start building the product for good“.
Yeah I feel somewhat the same way. This looks like some serious engineering effort went into it, and it looks like there should be a way to measure its impact on developer productivity and quality of output. I'm a bit hesitant considering finance is not an industry you want to introduce security problems in, but nonetheless will be a good test of these tools.
If it really does work I expect there will be many paid and open source variants that other companies can adopt into their workflows. So I'll patiently wait for the outcomes before trying something like this, but I'm glad someone is.
Is overengineering the norm nowadays?
If you need a queue, lpd. If you need scheduling, cron. If you need backups, tar. If you need to communicate, email and irc. If you need to remote any of those, ssh.
Things shouldn't be difficult, yet they are.
Do you have a specific critique or is this another dropbox-esque comment?
I tried reading TFA but it was full of garbage.