Show HN: Hot Dev – a new backend workflow language and platform
by csummers | 2026-01-28 16:51:45+00:00
Hi, I'm Curtis, the founder of Hot Dev, a new backend workflow platform.

Intro Blog Post: https://hot.dev/blog/introducing-hot-dev

Building modern backend systems often means wrestling with complex orchestration, scattered logging, poor observability, opaque AI integrations, and difficult developer/devops experiences. Hot Dev is designed to solve these problems!

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Why am I building Hot Dev?

As a backend developer for 25+ years, at almost every company, the backend team ends up cobbling together background utility servers and workers to process items off of queues, handle events coming into the system, run scheduled jobs and other on-demand asynchronous processes. This is more true in recent years because companies are integrating AI services into every part of their systems and workflows.

The team is tasked with choosing and building up each of these services from cloud providers (AWS, Google, etc) and integrating them into applications and backend services. These tasks create a lot of development work (i.e., time and money!) spent on managing and monitoring the infrastructure instead of thinking about your problem domain and your business.

Hot Dev provides a managed platform for defining and monitoring workflows at the problem-domain level--allowing you to focus on your business needs.

In the same way that Vercel runs your web app for you without you having to think about AWS EC2 servers or Kubernetes, Hot Dev runs your backend workflows for you without you having to think about AWS SQS, Kafka, or ECS.

Additionally, as a software developer, I care deeply about the Developer Experience and the DevOps Experience. Hot Dev is designed for a simple, streamlined developer experience...where local development matches production, and deploys are a single command: `hot deploy`

Download Hot Dev today for your Mac, Linux, or Window machine at https://hot.dev

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FAQ: (anticipating some HN crowd questions!)

Q: A new language. Are you crazy?

A: Yes, and maybe! But, I felt like bolting on the level of traceability to existing languages created lots of boilerplate code...obscuring the problem domain. It's definitely a trade-off, but one that I was willing to take. Hot is a simple, functional, expression-based language with immutable data and optional/gradual types. The language is inspired by Clojure with nods to Rust and Typescript. I think most developers will find it easy to learn and use. The Hot language vm and the platform itself is written in Rust.

Q: How do you compare to temporal, inngest, trigger.dev?
A:
Hot Dev supports many similar features for scheduled jobs, cancellations, failing, retries, and event-driven architecture. The primary differences are the use of the Hot Language to defined your workflows and Hot functions wrapping other API services--either your own backend APIs or other external API services.

And, as mentioned at the end of the intro blog post, I'll be adding two significant features to the platform soon:
1) Hot Box Container Execution--the ability to run an OCI container image as a Hot function
2) MCP (Model Context Protocol) support -- turn any Hot function into an MCP Tool.

Q: Is this Open Source?
A: Not yet, but this is the plan. I'm holding the reigns a little tight for now with the new language, but I expect the Hot language implementation to be open source within the year. If it helps...I'm also the author of HugSQL (https://hugsql.org).

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If you can't tell from the video, I'm having so much fun with this! Follow Hot Dev on X https://x.com/hotdotdev for updates!