Published on

Leap: The first AI Developer Agent that builds backends and deploys to AWS & GCP

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Marcus Kohlberg
    Twitter

Today we're launching Leap, an AI developer agent that helps you build and ship production-grade apps to your own cloud.

We started building Leap after trying every other AI app builder and hitting the same limitations: they only supported single-page apps, locked you into proprietary Backend-as-a-Service platforms, and lacked support for real production workflows.

Most of these tools don't even offer proper isolated test environments, making deployment risky. Approving a buggy SQL migration, for example, could affect your live database.

That might be fine for some use cases. But as developers, we needed support for advanced infrastructure, more complex architectures, and a more robust workflow.

To be fair, these limitations aren't necessarily flaws. Many of these tools are built for non-developers who value simplicity over flexibility.

We wanted something different.

We wanted a tool for developers, something that delivers the speed of AI without sacrificing control over architecture, APIs, infrastructure, or deployment.

That's why we built Leap.

What makes Leap different

You still start from a prompt. But everything after that is developer-first:

  • You iterate using changes and revisions, each change is like a pull request, grouping together a set of related revisions, while each revision is like a commit, capturing the specific modifications made. Every revision produces a diff so you can review and approve exactly what's changed. (Manual code edits are, of course, fully supported.)
  • A GitHub integration lets you own and control your codebase from the start.
  • Leap keeps you in control with live architecture diagrams and structured API documentation, helping you understand what the AI is building and making it easy to share that knowledge with others.
  • Leap's preview environment is completely isolated from your other environments, so you can test with confidence.
  • For deployment, you can use Encore.ts's open-source tools to package your app as a Docker container and deploy anywhere. Or use the integration with Encore Cloud to automate deployments and infrastructure provisioning, directly into your AWS or GCP cloud.

How Leap works

  • Leap uses Claude 4 Sonnet for most of the code generation, and also uses some other models like Gemini 2.5 for parts of the process.
  • Apps built with Leap use Encore.ts for the backend. It's our open-source framework, developed over the past few years, trusted by thousands of developers and with over 10k GitHub stars. The framework includes a declarative infrastructure layer, like a cloud-agnostic version of AWS CDK, which Leap uses to set up infrastructure for microservices, databases, pub/sub, storage buckets, and more.
  • Leap's isolated preview environments are set up using Firecracker running on Hetzner.

Where Leap fits in

Leap isn't meant to replace every other workflow or tool right away. We expect it to be most useful for spinning up new projects or building isolated systems within an existing product. You can easily move over to your regular IDE whenever you feel like it, using the GitHub integration to control your codebase.

We built Leap because nothing else met our needs as developers. Now that we're live and starting to welcome users, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

  • Does this solve any development or deployment pain you've experienced?
  • What would you need to confidently use this to build production-grade apps?

Your feedback will help shape where Leap goes next. We hope you'll give it a try and let us know what you think.

– The Leap Team

Questions? Join us on Discord or email us at hello@leap.new.