Show HN: Keystroke – open sourcing our internal agents and automations platform

Keystroke, a Y Combinator W24 company that pivoted from Buster, has open-sourced its internal agents and automations platform under the ELv2 license. The platform allows developers to build agents and durable workflows as TypeScript in their own repository and deploy them to a web application for team collaboration. Co-founder Dallin said he rebuilt Buster's AI data analyst in about five minutes using Keystroke, and the platform is designed to work with coding agents via a CLI and AGENTS.md file.

Hello HN, I’m Dallin, building Keystroke with my co-founder Blake. Keystroke is a recent pivot from Buster, our original YC W24 company. Keystroke lets you build agents and durable workflows as TypeScript in your own repo, then deploy them to a web application where your team can use them. Our repo ELv2 licensed is here: https://github.com/keystrokehq/keystroke https://github.com/keystrokehq/keystroke . At Buster, we spent a lot of time building internal agents and automations. We used visual platforms like n8n and Zapier, as well as code-first tools like Trigger.dev, Mastra, and several of Vercel’s open frameworks. We genuinely liked many of them, but kept encountering two different problems: 1. Visual platforms gave us integrations, credentials, hosting, and an app the rest of the team could use, but became difficult to test, review, and debug as our systems grew. 2. Code-first tools gave us the flexibility of ordinary TypeScript and worked well with coding agents, but left us building the UI, runtime, permissions, credentials, and operational tooling ourselves. So, we started building the thing we wish existed: a code-first framework that made it easy to build complex agents and AI systems, with a web app for teams to collaborate on top. We liked it so much that we decided to pivot away from Buster and focus on building Keystroke full time. With Keystroke, I was able to rebuild our W24 idea an AI data analyst in ~5 minutes. I pointed Cursor at our old Buster repo and it was able to: - spin up a local Keystroke project - rebuild the OG Buster agent w/ memory, its own file system, etc - connect our Postgres DB, PostHog, Metabase, and Slack - build skills for using each of the data sources - explore our DB and add schema docs to the file system - build a workflow to keep schema docs synced - name the agent "Delbert" - then pushed him up to the Keystroke app Since then, “Delbert” has been answering ad-hoc questions for me in Slack on a regular basis. He builds me metabase dashboards when I need them. He sets his own triggers, reviews key metrics periodically, and pings me in Slack if anything looks off. In Keystroke, workflows are ordinary async TypeScript: a for loop is an actual for loop, inputs use Zod schemas, and everything you build can be tested with Vitest. Our managed runtime makes workflows durable across errors, sleeps, approval steps, and process restarts. Agents wrap Vercel’s AI SDK and can use workflows, actions, other agents, MCP servers, and integrations as tools. They also include memory, a persistent filesystem, web search, triggers, and optional VM sandboxes. Deployed agents and workflows instantly appear in the web app with a chat UI, workflow visualizations, input forms, sharing, credential management, integrations, and logs. The entire platform was built from the ground up with coding agents in mind. Your coding agent can use the CLI to scaffold a local directory with a Keystroke project and an AGENTS.md . Then, it can build whatever agent or AI system you want, search our docs, run tests, and push what you build up to the Keystroke platform. We plan to make money from our cloud offering, which has a free plan and usage-based pricing. Our docs are here: https://keystroke.ai/docs https://keystroke.ai/docs . You can watch a quick demo of Keystroke here: https://supercut.ai/share/keystroke/zeor1pD0bNlSTOuLUWmRBT?v... https://supercut.ai/share/keystroke/zeor1pD0bNlSTOuLUWmRBT?viewVersion=true . You can try on cloud for free at: https://keystroke.ai/ https://keystroke.ai/ . We’d especially appreciate feedback from people who have maintained agents and AI systems in visual tools or code-first frameworks. Where does this approach seem useful, and where are we rebuilding something that already works well elsewhere? Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160376 Points: 1 Comments: 0