eallam

Hi HN, I’m Eric, CTO at Trigger.dev (https://trigger.dev). We’re a developer platform for building and running AI agents and workflows, open-source under the Apache 2.0 license (https://github.com/triggerdotdev/trigger.dev).

We provide everything needed to create production-grade agents in your codebase and deploy, run, monitor, and debug them. You can use just our primitives or combine with tools like Mastra, LangChain and Vercel AI SDK. You can self-host or use our cloud, where we take care of scaling for you. Here’s a quick demo: (https://youtu.be/kFCzKE89LD8).

We started in 2023 as a way to reliably run async background jobs/workflows in TypeScript (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34610686). Initially we didn’t deploy your code, we just orchestrated it. But we found that most developers struggled to write reliable code with implicit determinism, found breaking their work into small “steps” tricky, and they wanted to install any system packages they needed. Serverless timeouts made this even more painful.

We also wanted to allow you to wait for things to happen: on external events, other tasks finishing, or just time passing. Those waits can take minutes, hours, or forever in the case of events, so you can’t just keep a server running.

The solution was to build and operate our own serverless cloud infrastructure. The key breakthrough that enabled this was realizing we could snapshot the CPU and memory state. This allowed us to pause running code, store the snapshot, then restore it later on a different physical server. We currently use Checkpoint Restore In Userspace (CRIU) which Google has been using at scale inside Borg since 2018.

Since then, our adoption has really taken off especially because of AI agents/workflows. This has opened up a ton of new use cases like compute-heavy tasks such as generating videos using AI (Icon.com), real-time computer use (Scrapybara), AI enrichment pipelines (Pallet, Centralize), and vibe coding tools (Hero UI, Magic Patterns, Capy.ai).

You can get started with Trigger.dev cloud (https://cloud.trigger.dev), self-hosting (https://trigger.dev/docs/self-hosting/overview), or read the docs (https://trigger.dev/docs).

Here’s a sneak peek at some upcoming changes: 1) warm starts for self-hosting 2) switching to MicroVMs for execution – this will be open source, self-hostable, and will include checkpoint/restoring.

We’re excited to be sharing this with HN and are open to all feedback!