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Brooks is turning coding agents from a laptop experiment into managed cloud workers that engineering teams can budget, scope, and audit.
Hunter Brooks is co-founder and chief executive of Ellipsis, a New York developer tools company that runs coding agents in isolated cloud sandboxes for engineering teams.
Leaving Astrophysics for Capital One
Brooks studied math and physics and published research in astrophysics before deciding at the last minute to move into tech instead of a PhD, as he told Cerebral Valley. He taught himself to code and shipped production systems at Capital One, then worked as a machine learning engineer at AWS and Amazon Ads, according to his Y Combinator profile.
Building The Practical Interview
Despite years of engineering work, he struggled with algorithm puzzles in his AWS interview. That frustration became his first company, The Practical Interview, which generated real codebases for candidates to work in. The product did not become the business, but the code generation work behind it carried over into Ellipsis, which began as an AI code reviewer for GitHub pull requests.
Building Ellipsis in Y Combinator
Ellipsis went through Y Combinator in Winter 2024. Brooks has since moved the product from reviewing pull requests toward a platform where teams deploy fleets of coding agents, each with its own sandbox, scoped permissions, and hard budget caps, triggered from GitHub, Linear, Slack, or an API.
Personal Life
Brooks is based in New York. He has described the move from physics into software as a hard one, and that experience still shapes how he talks about developer tools that meet engineers inside their real work.
