The first commit landed on September 9. By September 26 there were more than 340 commits on main, more than 300 issues marked Done and a product you can pay for. Somewhere in there we were supposed to launch. We kept shipping instead.
So this is the launch post, seventeen days late and with receipts.
Hydrant has tracked its own development since the first week, and agents did much of the work from those tickets. Built by the agents it tracks covers why. This one covers what.
Already out the door
The tracker. Issues with priorities, sizes, labels, blocking and snooze. Projects with milestones that keep their own state: a project goes Active when work starts and Completed when the last issue lands, and nobody has to remember to click anything. Cycles with a burnup chart, a Roadmap, and Insights for what came in, what went out and who is holding what.
A home screen for mixed teams. Cockpit is your work plus the work of agents you own. Watchtower is everyone’s. The September 24 post explains the split.
Agents on the team. Agents connect over MCP with browser consent or an API key, scoped to one workspace and revocable whenever you like. Named agents take assignments like anyone else. Every issue can copy a prompt that tells an agent what to do next, and the workflow pack ships the same refine, prep, go and ship procedures we use on Hydrant. Start with Connect your agent.
Nagging, done politely. An in-app inbox, an email digest and a weekly recap of what you accepted, what your agents shipped and what closed. The emails switched on September 25.
The boring parts, done anyway. Workspace export, self-service account deletion, workspace deletion with a seven-day recovery window, encrypted backups and a security page. New workspaces start with a few issues and a walkthrough for connecting an agent, so the first screen is never a blank one.
A price tag. Free is two workspaces with one human each. Solo Pro is $6 a month or $60 a year per account, and members do not count as seats. Billing has been live since September 21. The fine print on pricing is short.
Words. Help went up on September 21, the manifesto on September 25, and this Log on September 26 with seven articles.
Since September 25 every production deploy gets a dated release tag. Nine went out that first day. Our changes are small. That is the whole trick.
On the bench
Projects pages. Arus went through the Projects list, the project page and its dialogs by hand and filed every rough edge as an issue. Twelve issues, four done. The rest cover wording, empty states, the side column and the dialogs.
Faster, on the same bill. The rule is no new services and no upgrades. We measured signed-in Hydrant from Houston and Bangkok, set targets and shipped two fixes: fewer database round trips on issue metadata, the workspace list and label saves, then fewer bytes and less waiting on a full page load. A third is iced for now.
Distribution. Hydrant already works with Claude Code and Codex. Still to do: a Claude Code plugin with marketplace install, an OpenAI plugin, and submissions to the official connector directories. Other people’s review queues set that schedule, so we will not pretend to.
More of this. Twelve more articles are written and signed. They go out on Mondays and Thursdays from September 28 to November 5: eight comparisons with other trackers and four stories about how we build.
Iced
Hydrant has a status called Iced for work that is decided but not now. We use it on ourselves.
The public launch checklist is mostly done. The last real item is a load test on production-shaped infrastructure, and it is iced for now. Until it passes, this post is as loud as we get.
Also iced: GitHub pull request integration, a Team plan for more than three humans, and passwordless email sign-in. Each one is waiting for someone to actually need it. If that is you, say so from Help & feedback › Send feedback in the app. That counts.
The next checkpoint will be shorter, and on time. Probably.
Filed under ShippedHenry Kobutra with Claude