Keelen VS Opalstack

Keelen's answer

Keelen works from a standing roadmap rather than from a prompt. It picks its own next task, implements it in an isolated single-use VM, and puts every change through five verification gates before merge: a red-first test proof (tests born green are rejected), an independent adversarial review of the diff by a model that shares no context with the run that wrote it, the project's own test suite on a clean checkout, a CI-green requirement at merge time, and a review window before gated auto-merge. The loop may never weaken a check to get to green. It runs on your own Claude, Codex, GLM, or Kimi key, so token usage bills to your provider account at cost with zero markup.

Keelen's answer

Keelen is not an IDE copilot and not a prompt-driven chat agent, so it does not need you present at the keyboard to make progress. Two differences matter most. First, verification is enforced rather than suggested: a new test must fail without the implementation and pass with it, an independent model reviews the diff adversarially, and the loop may never weaken a check to reach green. Second, you bring your own model key, so model spend stays on your own provider bill at cost and the Keelen tier stays a flat monthly price with zero token markup. Human control is configurable per project: plan review before any code is written, manual merge, or branch-only where Keelen never opens a pull request.

Keelen's answer

Solo developers, indie hackers, and small product teams who already pay for a Claude, Codex, GLM, or Kimi plan and want that capacity turned into merged pull requests while they work on something else. Agencies running several client repositories use the higher tiers for per-project isolation, more concurrent runs, and seats. Keelen suits people who keep a roadmap and want work picked up from it continuously, rather than people who want line-by-line completion inside an editor.

Keelen's answer

Keelen was founded in 2026 by Jamie Keelen. It grew out of a simple observation: coding models had become good enough to write the change, but not good enough to be trusted with merging it. The hard part was never generation, it was verification. So Keelen was built around gates instead of prompts. Keelen's own repository runs on the loop. The same gates, reconcilers, and recovery paths that customers get are the ones that ship Keelen itself, which means a weakness in the loop shows up as a failure in Keelen's own pull requests before it reaches anyone else.

Keelen's answer

The coding work itself is done by the model you connect: Anthropic Claude via Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Zhipu GLM 5.2, or Moonshot Kimi K3. Keelen is the loop around them. Each iteration runs in an isolated single-use, non-root VM that is destroyed when the run ends, with network egress deny-by-default through a proxy. Repository access goes through the official GitHub App, using per-run tokens scoped to a single repository for about an hour and with no permission to modify CI workflows. Keelen also exposes a hosted MCP server, so the loop can be driven from any MCP client. The projects it works on span TypeScript and JavaScript, Python, Go, Rust, C and C++, Godot, and Roblox.