Questions,
answered

Prod Buddy is an AI on-call engineer for software teams, built by Hova Labs. When Sentry reports a production error, Prod Buddy texts whoever is on call, diagnoses the root cause in a single-use sandbox, and opens a GitHub pull request with a minimal fix. The responder steers it by SMS and merges with a one-word reply, so an incident can go from error to merged fix in about four texts.

In four steps, all over SMS. First, Sentry sends the error to Prod Buddy's webhook; Prod Buddy de-duplicates it and texts the on-call engineer. Second, an AI agent clones the repository into an ephemeral sandbox, finds the root cause, and writes a minimal fix. Third, a pull request opens and CI runs; if CI fails, Prod Buddy diagnoses the failure and pushes a follow-up fix. Fourth, the responder replies MERGE, Prod Buddy merges once CI is green, and it watches the error for 30 minutes to confirm the fix held.

No. Prod Buddy never merges on its own — it merges only after a human says so, either an on-call responder replying MERGE or someone merging from the dashboard or GitHub. The SMS MERGE option is offered only when the project's auto-merge policy allows it for that environment and severity; otherwise the pull request waits for review on GitHub. Opening a PR is lower stakes: after diagnosing, Prod Buddy waits 10 minutes for extra context, then opens the PR for review unless someone replies NO, TICKET, or REVIEW.

ACK acknowledges the page and stops escalation. YES or SKIP opens the fix pull request right away. NO rejects the fix. TICKET files a ticket instead of opening a PR. REVIEW hands the incident to a human. MERGE merges the PR once CI passes. Any other text is treated as context and fed into a fresh diagnosis. Add an incident ID, like "MERGE PB-247", to target a specific incident.

Prod Buddy ingests production errors from Sentry, opens pull requests through the Prod Buddy GitHub App, files and updates tickets in GitHub Issues, and pages your team by SMS. Bugsnag, Rollbar, and Datadog for error monitoring, and Jira and Linear for ticketing, are on the roadmap. Source control is GitHub only; GitLab and Bitbucket are not supported yet.

Starter is $49/month for 20 incidents, 1 project, and 3 team members. Pro is $150/month for 50 incidents, 3 projects, and 20 team members. Both include SMS fix approvals, on-call schedules with escalation chains, analytics with a 90-day audit trail, and auto-merge with CI fix retries; extra incidents are $1.50 each. Enterprise is a custom annual contract — email hello@hovalabs.com.

One incident is one distinct error: a single Sentry issue in a single environment. Repeat occurrences while that incident is open roll into it instead of creating new incidents. By default Prod Buddy pages and starts diagnosing once an error crosses a severity threshold — 1 occurrence for critical, 3 for high, 10 for medium, and 25 for low — and each project can tune those thresholds.

Each Prod Buddy diagnosis runs in a single-use sandbox machine that is created for that incident and destroyed when the run ends. The sandbox clones your repository with a short-lived GitHub App token, limited to the repositories you install the app on, and nothing is kept afterwards. Diagnoses are powered by Anthropic's Claude, and Anthropic is not authorized to use your data for model training.

Prod Buddy escalates. If nobody replies ACK, it moves to the next person in the project's escalation chain once that step's wait time passes (15 minutes by default) and texts both the original responder and the next one. Rotations, escalation chains, and overrides for swaps and holidays are all managed inside Prod Buddy.

Prod Buddy covers the core on-call loop — rotations, escalation chains, overrides, and SMS paging — and then goes past paging by diagnosing the error and proposing a fix. Paging is SMS-only (no phone calls or mobile app), so teams that need voice escalation can run Prod Buddy alongside their existing pager.

Most teams are set up in an afternoon: create a project, point Sentry's webhook at the project's Prod Buddy ingest URL, install the Prod Buddy GitHub App on your repositories, and add your team's phone numbers to an on-call rotation. Sign-up is currently invite-only — join the mailing list at prodbuddy.ai for a launch invite, or email hello@hovalabs.com.