Security issuesarrive already resolved
IDC 2024 surfaced developers spend only 16% of their time on direct feature development. Security triage, backlog maintenance, and unplanned remediation work are among the primary contributors to the other 84%.
- Source: IDC, "The Business Value of Developer Productivity," 2024.
Security issues that interrupt your flow
A SAST issue assigned to your sprint is someone else's problem, landed on you.
Security scanners surface issues into a queue. Someone assigns the highest-severity items to a sprint. That assignment lands on an engineer who didn't introduce the issue, doesn't have context on the code, and now has to context-switch mid-sprint.
IDC, "The Business Value of Developer Productivity," 2024.42% of your working week is spent on code that already exists.
Stripe's 2018 Developer Coefficient study surfaced 42% of developer working time goes to technical debt maintenance - resolving, refactoring, and working around code that should have been addressed earlier. Security vulnerability debt is the most expensive category.
Stripe, "The Developer Coefficient," 2018.A failing security gate at PR time is the worst moment to surface out.
DORA 2024 showed that change failure rate is one of the four key metrics separating elite engineering teams. Security checks that surface issues at PR merge time, after the code is written and the context is cold, produce the highest interruption cost.
DORA, Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2024.Security issues that arrive already resolved
Security issues that don't land on your sprint
- Hyrax executes changes autonomously - issues don't enter the sprint backlog, they enter Hyrax's execution queue
- You review and approve PRs Hyrax opens, same as any other PR - you don't generate the change
- Context is provided: every Hyrax PR includes the issue, the change rationale, and the test results
Debt that decreases instead of accumulating
- Hyrax's Scan and Upgrade workflows work through the backlog continuously between sprints
- Every change matches the conventions Discovery learned from your codebase - so recurrences get caught before they reach you
- Every change Hyrax executes ships as a verified PR with the [Hyrax] prefix
Issues at introduction, not at PR
- Hyrax scans continuously - not only when a PR opens
- Issues introduced in the current branch surface before the PR is open, not after
- The 13-step verification runs pre-merge: baseline tests written, resolve validated, PR opened only if tests pass
Before and after Hyrax, at the IC level
| Workflow moment | Without Hyrax | Hyrax |
|---|---|---|
| Security issue introduced | Issue queues in dashboard; arrives on your sprint in 2-3 weeks | Hyrax surfaces and executes the change within hours |
| Sprint planning | Unresolved security items added to board alongside feature work | Security backlog is handled outside sprint |
| PR review | You receive security issue comments to address before merge | You review Hyrax's PRs the same way you review any teammate's PR |
| CI failure on security gate | Context-switch back to code you wrote last week | Resolve is already merged before the gate would have fired |
| Debt backlog | Accumulates between sprint cycles; grows faster than it closes | Continuous execution - backlog decreases without sprint allocation |
Common questions
from software engineers
Hyrax opens PRs autonomously. How do I know the code is correct?
Hyrax runs a 13-step verification before any PR opens: baseline tests are written first, the change is applied, and the test suite must pass before the PR is created. Every PR includes the issue, the change diff, and the test results.
I already review PRs. Won't Hyrax PRs add more review work?
No - the review replaces work, it doesn't stack on top of it. Each Hyrax PR is a narrow, single-issue change with the issue, resolve diff, and passing tests attached, so there's no context to reconstruct. The PR Review workflow reviews every PR and blocks merge on must-resolve issues first, so what reaches a human is already verified. The alternative - triaging the issue, writing the change, and reviewing it by hand - is the work that goes away.
What if Hyrax's upgrade is wrong or introduces a regression?
The 13-step verification is designed to prevent this. Baseline tests fail before the PR opens if the change breaks expected behavior. You still have final approval before anything merges - Hyrax cannot self-merge.
What languages does Hyrax support?
JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, Ruby, and Java at launch. These cover the primary backend and full-stack languages.