Vercel Sandbox: Run Cline In the Cloud

[Music] How's everyone doing? I see we're totally packed. I like that. I am going to talk about something that I'm very excited about, which is running Klein. So, I joined Klein as head of operations, which is really just a catch-all saying that I just do whatever needs to be done. If there's a hat, no one's wearing it. I wear the hat. Um, so let's get started here.

So we're going to quickly talk through today about what it's like to be an agentic coding company and how that process of building a company in this space really works. Some of the lessons we've learned as a company that builds a lot of software and we do it very quickly with AI. And then kind of my process for how I started thinking about putting Klein in the cloud because one of the things that I really like about coding agents is they're autonomous, but they're not autonomous if they rely on

my uh computer. So to kick us off, I'm going to tell the story of how we started. We were founded by this guy SA Rwan, who's amazing. He it was actually a hackathon project for Anthropic, which of course he lost, which is a big L on Anthropic's side. And SA didn't stop. He kept kept going. He kept building. He didn't let that sway him. And um by the time I found out about it, it was one of the most well- adopted open- source coding agents in the space. So, as you

can see, we've got some really big names who are using Klein. They have forks of Klein potentially. They may even have products that are built off of Klein. in the case of Salesforce. Um, and I think when I joined in January, there was about 300,000 installs. And now I don't even know like we put this number in 3.5, but I bet it's like higher than that already. And so the way I think about client and found out about it is it's kind of this special ops agent. Um, I started with cursor like everyone else. And I was like, okay, can this

write code for me? Can it do my job for me? Basically, and unfortunately not quite there yet. So when I discovered Klein, I was very excited because it was the first tool that kind of it had all of the features I was expecting and hoping for. It could edit files. It could use my terminal. At the time, this was like revolutionary. And um I was just a software engineer, so anything I could do to save time for myself would be a huge benefit um for me really. And I had this moment where I

was building this application that uh cued messages and sent it to the other side. Don't worry about it. The point is it was really boring and it was server side and what I ended up doing is I spent about 25 bucks and Klein did what I thought was a fiveday project in an afternoon while I was playing mobile games. My boss was very happy when I told him that. But I was like, "Oh no, I just spent more than my cursor subscription in a single setting. That's

not good." And then the more I thought about it, I was like, well, this is actually pretty cool because I just did what I thought was 5 days worth of work and it only cost me 25 bucks. So that's really a good performance multiplier on what I'm trying to do. And so I got very excited about client. This like totally made me believe that this AI thing is here to stay. And yes, I had been using Claude quite a bit uh to try to do the same thing, but it didn't quite take my

job in the way that Klein did. And so I knew I had to join. And so when I saw SA tweeting that he was looking to hire people in San Francisco, I had to tweet at him. And that's essentially how this journey began. So when I joined Klein, um it was pretty clear. It was just SA and our marketing guy. It was really clear that what we needed to do was scale the team. We're competing against cursor which has millions of dollars in funding. And so the question kind of became, how do we scale this team? How do we grow it as fast as possible