We design and develop CreST, a new generation, automated secure computation framework, that aims to bridge the gap between generality and custom optimizations. We show how this framework allowed us to easily implement efficient oblivious algorithms that was previously insurmountable to implement due to limitations of existing secure computation frameworks. We also show how this framework inspired us to create new oblivious algorithms and solve several open questions of interest to the algorithms community. We will open source CreST and our rich libraries to the community, offering a reusable framework to implement and distribute new cryptographic algorithms.