What Happens When Everyone Can Build Software

Supabase has become one of the default backends for the AI coding era. The open source Postgres platform now has 13 million users, spins up more than a million databases every week, and roughly 70% of its new activity is coming from agents. As coding shifts from developers writing software by hand to agents building on their behalf, Supabase has been rebuilding itself around that new user. Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone joins Garry, Harj, and Jared on the Lightcone to talk about what happens when everyone can become a builder. They dive into why personal software may become as common as personal documents, how to design products that agents actually want to use, and why knowing what to build may matter more than knowing how to build it.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm genuinely excited about what the future could be for a lot of people. The thing that I really love about Superbase is that I see a lot of entrepreneurship because of the platform. I certainly think that it'll be the case that everyone in the world with access to AI will become a builder of some sort. Like you can build anything, you can customize it. You want to make tweaks to some app, some UI, then you don't have to be beholden to someone. I'm pretty pumped about 2027, actually.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone. Today, we're joined by Paul Copperstone, co-founder and CEO of Superbase, the open source Postgres backend that's become the default database inside tools like Claude Code and Codex. Superbase now has 13 million users and it's spinning up over a million databases a week. Paul, welcome to The Light Cone.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  So to start off, famously, YC gives you a T-shirt on the first day of YC that says, "Make something people want." But increasingly, all of us are realizing it's make something agents want. And your company really exemplifies that. Something like 70% of the new activity is from agents. Isn't that crazy?

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's wild. It's wild. I think this year especially, what we've seen in terms of the numbers, the inflection, is just a huge shift towards agents.

• 1:29Speaker 00

  Just so we can understand just how much you guys have grown, because it's kind of mind-boggling. What are the numbers you care about and where were you this time last year and where are you now?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  I think this time last year, so yeah, we're 13 million signups now. Probably 12 months back, we would have been around three perhaps. This year, like revenue will grow four X. We've got, I'm trying to think what.

• 1:55Speaker 00

  You've got like a million day basis being created per week at the moment.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Over a million. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  What was it this time last year?

• 2:01Speaker 02

  I think actually if databases under management now are approaching 50 million. And this time last year it was eight million. So it's just a huge, huge inflection.

• 2:12Speaker 00

  What's been driving that?

• 2:13Speaker 02

  First, people are building with abandoned software engineers. Second, I think that there are a lot more builders coming online. So what was traditionally someone with a software engineering background is now, it's now becoming possible for non-engineers to actually build things on top of Superbase.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  So this is a really big shift. What have you guys actually done to facilitate or encourage this shift from, you know, obviously, software engineers are going to keep choosing Superbase, but how do you get the agents to come over in the first place?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, we largely have seen like three chapters in Superbase. We started as a dashboard company, then we went to an API company, and now we're very much a code-first company. So we try to have the modalities that the agents really want to build with, which is code-first. They really want to use CLIs most of the time. The other thing is just being chosen as a default in the LLMs, which I think we were a huge beneficiary of our, of our, the timing of which we started to become a default choice for databases.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  How much do you think being open source played a role in it too? Because the agents love open source things.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  You know, it's hard to know the counterfactual, but I think it was critical. I mean, everything that we do is open source and it seems to have been a huge benefit to us. And we do it in a very open-sourcey way. Like we tried to support existing tools. It's not just Superbase tools. We, we support, like Postgres is a very famous tool for the Postgres ecosystem, and we helped to maintain that. So we've kind of got sprawl across many communities.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  I would guess that the agents actually really like open source, because when something goes wrong, it can just look at the source.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I noticed the agents really like feeling powerful and they love data. And there's nothing more frustrating than hitting a brick wall and then you don't know what's going on and you can't fix it.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  I think it's going to be increasingly important as well, because now with, you know, security being so important, I think a lot of the, say, enterprises are going to want to inspect the source code to know that it's secure. And if you've got closed source code, then you probably won't want to adopt them as a vendor.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Is developer even still sort of the, the core user that you're going after? Or how, you know, how do you think about it now in 2026?

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that the world where we're moving and at least what we're seeing this year is like, kind of builders, builders are coming online and it's like a crazy amount of people coming online. The crazy thing about this year is usually when you're like on top of funnel, our signups are accelerating. And usually when this happens, you see a lot of the other numbers start to decline, activation, conversion. But actually this year, all of them are kind of going up and to the right, which is a bit insane, just because the models are getting so good at building. And we're starting to see people who traditionally wouldn't have a software engineering background, able to come and, and build things.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  That's the distinction is like builder as in they might not be actually software engineers. They might just be someone who needs to build a thing and they're just, you know, popping open Claude Code and then it turns out files only get you so far.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And in some ways, like this category of people have all these pent up ideas that they could never convince a software engineer to like help them build. And now they don't have to convince anyone. They've got all these ideas that they're churning out. Software engineers still make up a huge portion, but the rate of the growth of the builder segment is, is pretty, pretty big. Also, like, I don't know where the ceiling is on this one. Like I, I remember our early investors were saying, ah, PLG, product like growth, it's going to tap out at this revenue and you'll have to start moving into this segment of the market. And there just appears to be no ceiling so far. And I, I can't see where it stops.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I mean, that was basically true like two years ago or one year ago, but definitely not true this year.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was just talking to someone actually this last weekend. If it's the builder category, it's like a fintech founder just exited his company of like over a billion dollars. And he's always been sort of product adjacent, like studying math at, like as an undergrad and sort of like, kind of could pull together some Ruby scripts, but like always needed an engineer to like build the software. And now it's side projects, he's just building his own stuff. And he has all the knowledge from how to build a fintech company. So he can actually build pretty sophisticated, just like for his own personal finances, like balance sheets and tracking software and knows how to like integrate in with banks. And he's writing all the integrations from scratch. And it's just like the kind of software that would never have been built even two years ago.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  These are the perfect type of builder as well, because like developers like me, I have very like developer-focused ideas and things that I want to build. But then you've got all these domain experts and they know exactly the niches of, oh, this is an unsolved problem in my niche. And so they're actually able now to like dig right into those niches without having to convince someone else to join them. I think you guys were talking about this, weren't you, in, in YC? Like the profile shifting even from, from who you're bringing into the cohort.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I think that if you look at the sort of era of what, 2022, 2025, there's sort of this real shift thinking like, well, AI is coming. And suddenly having software engineering as a, you know, core, you know, you need a technical co-founder no matter what. That was like a mega idea that, you know, really came to the fore at YC during that time period. It was always sort of true, but like sort of doubled down on that. And then really in the last year, we sort of said, actually, yeah, builders. Like we're starting to see people who are able to like, I mean, the much harder thing to do is to know what to build. You know, being able to build is something that anyone can sort of have on tap now. And that's actually a really cool thing.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Like, can you imagine all the things that never would have built exactly for what you said? It's like, oh, we know that people would buy this. We know that there's a problem here. But at the margins, those people couldn't convince an engineer to work on it.

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Do you have some examples, Paul, of like apps that people have built on Superbase? Maybe just for themselves that are the kinds of things that would have never been built before?

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Well, one kind of cool example was at our conference, we had the conference here. And afterwards, this guy from Brazil came up to me and he's built an entire taxi app from his phone. And it's kind of like a little mini Uber for his local market. And I just thought, he's a taxi driver himself. I don't actually know why he built it, but the fact that he could build it. And he came up extremely grateful and that he could do this. And also like with the type of energy, he's, he was like 50 years old or something like that. But he had the energy of a like teenager building suddenly, which I think is kind of cool. Because now it's kind of getting to that stage where I, I think it's a little bit.

• 9:35Speaker 00

  There's so much uncertainty around like, what is the future of work going to look like? But in this category of builders, there's that excitement of the future. And that's really what I love about Superbase. It's like something that people can come in and those who are uncertain now are discovering this skillset and these opportunities where previously they were just blue collar workers, these type of profile.

• 9:59Speaker 03

  Hart, you've been building some of your own personal software recently.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  You talk about what you've been cooking up.

• 10:03Speaker 00

  It's just grown, yeah, it's sort of like the end of one stuff, but it's just grown out of getting really addicted to open claw. Actually, like maybe six months ago now, embarrassed I said it, I said like, there was going to be no UIs and it was all just going to be like chat through my open claw. But it turns out actually, and I also was really determined not to use a database for a long time. I just wanted everything to be in markdown. But yeah, it turns out actually you hit a point where like a database is useful and you do need UI. And so I've just been building that over the last couple of weeks in particular. And so it's like, I mean, I call it a control tower, but it's just like sort of every section of my life. I know like I have like a UI to like triage all my emails, so I don't need to read my inbox.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  Finances, tracking like spending, health, like both like tracks my weight and my workouts and everything is all in like one place. But I think the magic of it is sometimes it's a mind boggling thought, actually, is like, I think about like the finance section of like my one app for myself is better, I think, is at least feature parity to Mint or Monarch or all of these things, but in some ways actually better because you can start doing really personalized context. Like it can figure out what a transaction is by looking up in my, like the name in my G brain to figure out who that person is, oh, like, I know that's like, and categorize it correctly. And that was like a whole company, like several startups just doing personal finance. And I can just like build it for yourself and I don't need it to work for anyone else or like have anyone else's opinion on it.

• 11:28Speaker 00

  It's just like, kind of like my thing is like, is kind of awesome.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  We see a lot of that one, like where it's finance and health, basically the two like ones where you want your own data.

• 11:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  So we see a lot of people doing that and syncing all the devices to, to a single database is kind of a

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  magic skill and you can like prompt it to like build these correlations across.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  The correlations are really bad. Like again, if you just take the health example, it's like, yeah, all of that data is in like my two base database. But then it also has access to my calendar, so it knows things like, it's like, oh, like your weight, I know your weight went up recently, but like you were traveling, so that's okay. Like you can just like get back on track next week and it just has like this context that's really valuable.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  I also found that as I started to use the personal agents, like I'm getting a little bit paranoid that I'm putting all of like, all of the like routines and everything and the CRM is becoming like boxed into one agent. And so now I'm slowly extracting it out into one so that if I want to attach different agents on top, then I know that like I can use any, any agent. So the CRM is another really critical one.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's why you guys are so valuable is like, actually like it's like the, it's sort of like the store record. What's the, the, the database is actually the thing that's valuable and like you don't, you want to own your own database and then build all the applications or agents on top of it versus having that all in like someone else's database.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Which is a totally wild idea. Like if you just think about the history of databases, it used to be the case that like the world had only a relatively small number of very large databases run by like large companies. And I remember like when Superbase got started, you kind of had this idea that they should be like really easy for everyone to like make a database. And it almost like, didn't make sense at the time, why so many people would want to do that? Cause unless you can write code, what can you do with a database? And there's just not that many people who can actually like write code and build a personal CRM like that. Like it's just like too much work for most people pre-AI.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Like another example, actually, where Super is really valuable for me is like the other section I have is just like a file upload. It sounds very simple, but like any file I can sort of either forward via email or just like dump it in this UI. And then like my agent like figures out what that is and how it's relevant to my life and like what to do with it. But that's all being stored on Superbase. And so, yeah, in general, it's just like, Superbase is actually going to end up having like all of the like data about my life in a single place. And like, I would, yeah, I would never have thought about wanting a personal database like a year ago because it wouldn't have made any sense. But now I'd like, that's actually like the most valuable thing.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have like an S3 compatible Superbase files thing and all my stuff is in that.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Oh, really? Nice.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  It's default in G brain.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Great, thank you.

• 14:15Speaker 03

  Do you think this is the future, Paul, where like basically everyone in the world, not every developer, every person will have a Superbase database that has stuff about their life in it, their health, their finances, their relationships?

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'd love that. I mean, I, I certainly think that it'll be the case that everyone in the world with access to AI will become a builder of some sort, like you can build anything, you can customize it. You want to make tweaks to some app, some UI, then you don't have to be beholden to, to someone. Of course, like we think of ourselves as an index company. We, when we came into YC, we just focused on YC companies. We wanted to win all YC customers and like now that was because we knew that we had to be there on day one when businesses were getting started. The mission didn't change, just the aperture has like increased significantly.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Now, as more builders come online, we know that we need to service them, which is actually a whole different problem to solve, but kind of an exciting one.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Significantly meaning like 10 million X.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, so what, we launch now a million databases every single week. But I mean, if you do some basic arithmetic, let's say with ChatGPT, I think they said they've got 1.2 billion weekly active users. And let's say all of them want to launch something every month, that's 1.2 billion databases a month. And so that's like the scale that we're moving towards architectures that we need to have so that we can actually cater for, for that scale, which is something that has never had to happen before on the database, database realm.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Can you even do that with Postgres? Or are you going to have to build your own database engine to scale to one billion new databases per week?

• 16:02Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, well, if we could negotiate better with AWS, then maybe we could. But it turns out that everyone wants computers at the moment. And, and actually I like, I don't know if you need like such a Ferrari for a lot of these workloads. And we made an acquisition recently, Terso. They've got a, a architecture that's compatible with Postgres and actually it's compatible with SQLite as well. I think SQLite is a phenomenal database. And so we'll provide this tier, which we call Superbase Spark, which is basically for, for these getting started workloads. The idea won't be the same. You get started with the same experience, you can scale up to petabytes.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  So our tagline is kind of prototype to petabytes. And we as a company need to make sure that we can provide for everyone. And if they do scale up and their business keeps growing, then we make sure that they have a great time.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's something I was curious about how you think about this actually is like the classic sort of software company you start with, you know, maybe early stage startups, like in a YC batch. And then you sort of have one eye towards the enterprise. And I feel like especially if you're a database company, like pre-AI, the conventional wisdom as well, like you want to be oracle. So you've got to get to the enterprise as quickly as you can, because that's where all the money is. And so you start building out like enterprise features. You sort of leaning into SQLite is sort of going the opposite direction. Like, how do you, how do you think about it? Like, are you sort of looking both ways?

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we're having to do both, which is like incredibly difficult. Basically, we've got two products that cater on the two ends. So multi-Grasset scale up to petabytes and then Terso scale down to like these prototyping and SQLite type workloads. So trying to do this at the rate of growth with like having to employ more people. It's just even with AI is becoming, or has been a real challenge, but a fun one.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  So you ran a poll recently where people went from 10% of your engineers were writing 80% of their code with the coding agents. And then that number recently got up to 60% in a matter of six months. Like, how did that happen? What's happening? Like, you know, where's this going from here?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  So we don't have an AI policy internally. We just let people do whatever they, whatever they want and we give them access to, to whatever tools they, they want to use. And I think now it's just that they're convinced that the models can do so much better, better work and so much more. So the adoption has been crazy and. Yeah, the, the things that they're building internally are not just five coded type stuff. They're pretty intense. And as we're like shifting into this, uh, like AI coded realm, like just the amount of testing that we're doing. And the tools that we're adopting for testing has been pretty useful to make sure that they actually know that the end result is gonna be good.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're seeing that across Y C, the Y C startups like Blacksmith, Depot, Ubi Cloud, like they're all vertical. Cause everyone's doing C I.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And the number of tests that you have are just like through the roof.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Crep tile for like review.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  So that's pretty wild, honestly, to see. Was it like a pretty, like, it's just the models are good enough now. And like, it's just people spend enough time where they're like, oh, actually this is quite good.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  And people need to be convinced, especially engineers, like, I mean, they might not. At the start of the year, I've thought that it was very good. And the models have gotten better, but also they're starting to see, oh, actually you can achieve some great things with, with these models. And all the stuff with Navia Stokes and all these stuff are like convincing the market that actually, yeah, we can break new ground here. So I think that's the world that we're moving towards. And now people are convinced that this is the way that it's going to be.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  You've seen Superbase like through three eras, first kind of like a dashboard company. Built in a hundred days during Y C, then the API company. And then now it's, you know, sort of this agent, you know, make something agents want sort of moment. Was there like one or two things like in each era that really jumped out and you was like, oh, that was the thing that made us in that moment?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  I think like those shifts happened. So the first one, actually, yeah, I think you're saying like, why would a database? Company exist when we came into Y C?

• 20:32Speaker 01

  It seemed like such a contrarian idea at the time, actually.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think like we saw how hard it was to use a database, even for developers. And so that dashboard first was like, oh, let's build a UI that looks like Airtable on top of Postgres. Because I actually loved Airtable as well. I was like, wouldn't it be cool if that was just a Postgres database on the backend? So, um, that one was just seeing that even software engineers struggled. And then like, when we moved to AI, I think we talked about this on the other podcast. The AI, uh, API, um, shift was because we had someone integrating with us and they were like, oh, we want to launch lots of databases. We need an API to do all of this. And that was like 2021, maybe.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  And it turns out that was exactly the right move for 2024, when the likes of Bolt and Loveable and all of these people started building on top of us. Then this year, I just saw that actually no one's coming to the dashboard. Like no one, no one visits dashboards anymore. So, um, how are agents gonna build? In this one, I just kind of put out a product memo to the team that said, it has to be code first, get native. Superbase just has to shift to code first. So if it exists on the dashboard, it basically has to work in lockstep in code. Infrastructure is code, uh, essentially. And we re-architected a lot of the CLI and everything to work in sandboxes in code.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Well, you guys may be too far back, but were you ever inspired by Parse, another white company?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parse and Firebase, I, I liked both of those companies. And it's funny, these waves, right? Because they did the backend and Firebase acquired by Google and Parse by Meta. But in some ways, I think they like blazed the trail for us to come along and actually have a legitimate database business. Because in 2014, it would have been ridiculous not to use R D S for your, for your database. Then they came along, Mongo came along, uh, Mongo started moving to Atlas. And a lot of these database companies kind of showed that you don't need to just use one of the three hyperscalers.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  You can actually have a legitimate database company. And, um, so that, that timing was crucial for us.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, Parse sort of forgotten that, but it was like a really well-built product. They launched like just when I was building iPhone apps for the first time. And it was like quite nice to switch to like a nice restful API that I was trying to deal with.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  These shifts always happen with like inflection points, right? So at that point, there were two things that happened in the market. Somehow MongoDB convinced everyone that NoSQL was supposed to be like an amazing, uh, way to store your data. And, um, the second was mobile. And so, you know, we're fortunate that we had a couple of these waves as well. And now we're right in the thick of it and.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, this is what I was asking about, sort of like how you think about the enterprise early. Cause I think, I mean, if you go even further back, this is sort of like Heroku was the first where it's like, okay, like just start with like the best developer experience. And then scale up. But it is actually, can be quite hard to like scale up with people. And I think like, you know, Heroku to, I don't think could quite bridge that gap, um, to how do you keep people on you? Like as the apps get bigger and, and need to be more performant, et cetera, et cetera. But like historically, every company's had to figure that out. And like, I know you guys are looking that way, but you might not have to. Like honestly, if the, the, the market for just owning like, I don't know, call it zero to 10, whatever, like keeps expanding at this rate, it's gonna be huge.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we want it all. So, uh, we might not have to, but, uh, we'll definitely do it. And like kudos to Heroku. I think they popularized Postgres. But at the time, Postgres was pretty, uh, it was still pretty nascent and it's still got some scaling, um, limitations. And so, yeah, we've had to wrap Postgres and some tooling that will allow it to scale indefinitely. But.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess a better analogy for you guys is more like AWS was able to actually like get people early and like scale.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  And so do you, yeah, like what are the lessons maybe? Like, how, how do you think about making sure you can scale infinitely?

• 24:52Speaker 02

  The lesson, I think that they, I heard a stat and was telling me, um, I might get it wrong, so fact check me. But something like 40% of AWS's revenue comes from like startups that started on them and then scaled up. And like, that's the category that we want, you know, like, we know that to convince people to migrate to, from one database provider to another is near impossible. And so we just want to be there on day one, make sure that they have a great time and then make sure that they actually don't want to leave.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  The same business model to Stripe. I mean, it's like basically the best business model on earth, if you can get it. Like get them on day one and then just like scale with like the fastest growing companies in the world infinitely.

• 25:33Speaker 02

  And you just do that for a generation and you become a generational business. That's pretty much it. Yeah. It's hard for us because what does day one look like? That's rapidly shape, uh, changing. So in the past, day one for me was always like Y C customers. And now day one is becoming like, okay, everyone's a builder. What are they gonna use? What are the modalities? What, uh, how are they gonna choose their databases? These are tricky questions.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Y C's next batch is now taking applications. Got a startup in you? Apply at ycombinator.com slash apply. It's never too early and filling out the app will level up your idea. Okay, back to the video.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  It's kind of a different customer segment, like, like initially when you started, like, there was not an individual market for databases. Like the idea of a database company being a direct to consumer business would have just like sounded like a syntax error.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  But now you actually have two segments. You have the like early stage companies that, that has this powerful Stripe business model. But you're also like selling directly to consumers or to their agents perhaps.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  And those use cases presumably will not scale the way startups will. But they might just like continue to use you for like, for the rest of their lives, because you're powering the app that like runs their personal finance software. Taxi cab company or something like that.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And as their lives grow and they accumulate information, that is basically an index of our, our own growth, you know? So they just store more, people are collecting more data. This kind of prosumer market is essentially a, a good growth vector for us.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  I guess do you think about the personal agent world in that, through that perspective then? If sort of coding agents want Superbase, that's very clear. Like, do you think about the next phase as being, assuming we all have personal databases? Like, do you need to do anything to make sure that it's easy for personal agents to talk to you? Is that any different or is it basically the same thing?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm very bullish now on personal agents after a week of my EA being away and, uh, me learning exactly what they can do. And now I'm just kind of obsessed with the idea of building for personal agents. And it's true that I, I said to our company, like we're code first, um, like we're building for humans that are doing code first. But actually we're doing it for agents. Those humans pretty soon won't actually be interacting. So like the way I've been building is I'm using dots. I just sit on a phone call with it all the time and I'm chatting to it and saying, oh, can you make these changes? And my, my kind of heuristic to make sure I'm building or dog fooding correctly is that I just don't look at the code.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  And I don't allow myself ever to check the architecture, except when I want to check that it's actually building things correctly. But when I'm making these changes, I just want to talk to it and see what it can change. So.

• 28:25Speaker 00

  One of us.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  It's crazy as well. Like it's doing some phenomenal stuff that I just, it, it feels like something out of a sci-fi movie from like two years ago. But now like I'm having so many of these moments that I'm just mind blown. If you had shown someone this six months ago, they would have just thought it was impossible.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, you, I was at, um, your Superbase Select conference a couple of weeks ago, which is awesome conference, by the way. And I had this like kind of crazy thought. I was sitting there and you were talking about all these awesome new features that Superbase was putting out.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  I was like, you know, if I was building an app on Superbase, maybe I wouldn't even care to understand all these awesome features myself. I want to like send my agent to Superbase Select to like listen to all the awesome new features and figure out how to integrate them into my codebase.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Oh, that's wild. A truly virtual conference. We should do that, a conference just for agents.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  For agents, a conference for agents.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  They all turn up live.

• 29:26Speaker 03

  Live, they can like talk to each other, exchange tips on like.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Book live.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  We can bridge it. You can sort of airdrop and like the markdown files for everyone, but you have to be there in like the, the audience to get it.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  We'll call it the art factory.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Oh, man. I like that.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  We talked about before this, like, there's just a bunch of things that you've been doing that like really make agents like you better. Like error messages, you know, you know, what was that key insight? And like, are there a bunch of other things that you're doing that kind of obvious on the one hand, on the other hand, like, nobody's doing yet?

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. So like the error messages, yeah, I was at a dev tools in a last night and I was surprised that this wasn't so obvious. But we really dug into our error messages so that you can take a use case like, oh, I want to build an application. And generally like developer to error messages at like 500, um, something basic. And you just know there's a problem, but now you actually want the agents to like remedy themselves. So inside the error messages, you are literally telling them how to fix this error or to go and read some docs to fix the error. So a lot of it is just picking your use case and just trying to do these loops on improving your own error messages. So that you can one shot basically anything that you want.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense. Basically, you know, if you're being used by an agent, the agent will encounter a error message. In the past, a human would have to go Google that and do a bunch of stuff. But here you can just say, oh, like, you're just, you know, out of I node, so you should probably go do this.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, because there's like two stages to winning the agents. The first is being picked by the model. And then the second is like, if they get stuck, you don't want them to switch away. So guaranteed they'll get stuck at some point. You just want to give them the tools to to remedy. So it's not actually that complicated. They're smart enough now that they can figure out a lot of stuff, but you do have to re-engineer a lot of what previously was just for humans and developers for agents.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Do you test your project, your product for agents? Like, do you have agents like try to use Superbase and then like report all the places where they had trouble?

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. All the different models. We've got an evals website where we see which models are building the best. And we've got our own eval suite internally. We eval as well, which ones are best just with Postgres. So that's interesting for the industry and build skills around it so that they can adopt them and actually develop with Postgres. So, yeah, it's a lot of testing. And in fact, pretty much now, a lot of our engineering effort is going into like testing specific use cases rather than the building. We want to think through how people are building and build suites around that.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Kerry, when you built G-Brain, you built it on top of Superbase. Can you talk about like, how did you decide to build it on top of Superbase? Well, how is it like for you to be a user?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess, I mean, G-Brain was like a distillation of a bunch of stuff I wrote. Like, I first worked on Gary's list, which was like agentic, it was like an agentic newsroom. And I had to build up like basically a research system for RAG and for like policy and papers. And it would like read every newspaper article about a given topic and then try to synthesize. And then I took that and then distilled it into open source retrieval for OpenClaw. Because the idea was like, okay, I had it in Rails and that was kind of like a Foxconn factory for agents. It's like, I treated every LLM call as very expensive and incredibly dangerous.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And then when I saw OpenClaw, it was this, you know, it was kind of like Esalen. It was just like a very different way for, uh, you know, you to work with AI. Because then it's like, oh, the AI is smart, uh, it's not trying to hurt you. And then you should just let it like do stuff and you should just give it data and capabilities. And so I recognized a million tokens is actually an incredible working memory. Like, most human beings only have like seven plus or minus two things that they can keep in their head. Whereas like a million tokens is like basically, uh, like three Harry Potter books. But then even that is like a little bit limiting for the agents. Like, keeping the correct three Harry Potter books in your context at a given time is a real challenge.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  So it felt like there was this thing in between for a company brain or like my personal stuff. It's like, I have half a million markdown files on like every communication I've ever had. And so this thing really does have context on me and everything that I care about. But then at any given moment, like the agent, they might need like two pages or something. It's it's a retrieval problem. And so at that point, you know, at many, I think it's like 30, 40 gigabytes. You need PG vector, you need Postgres, you know, you can do graph databases very easily in SQL. And so that's what G-Brain is.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  It's like, you know, RAG retrieval, um, plus like a graph database that creates like structure out of unstructured data. And so it's like dynamic schemas, like a little bit like what I remember Palantir was back in the day. And then, you know, the entire idea is that agents are much more powerful when there's sort of this intermediate thing where the agent can just say like, this is what I'm looking for and it'll traverse the graph. It'll do all of the, uh, you know, uh, vector search and it'll come back and say like, here, here's a report and like load this into context. And so that's what G-Brain is. And then Superbase was just like very straightforward.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  It's like, I need, I need hosted Postgres and I need it to be able to support like a 50 or 100 gig or 300 gigabyte, you know, database corpus really fast. And it's been great, like, you know, the auto scaling works really, really well. And now the funniest thing is like with browser use, like I use a side browser now for browser use. And it's like, oh yeah, like OpenClaw can go into Superbase and, you know, use the database or the new APIs you made. And it's just like managed it itself. It can like self-manage.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Were you having to prompt it to like figure out the data structures, like graphs or like RAG or anything like that?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Or? Uh, I mean, what's funny is like, I, I remember going into Claude Code and just saying like, use Alexa and download every, download and dirize every paper you can find in AI research. Today I could use like Alpha Signal or something, but it's like, go and find every piece of research about RAG and graph databases and like, you know, text retrieval. And then summarize it for like my use case, which is like, how do I help an agent get access to this stuff? And then after it did that, it's like, oh, okay, well, here's, here's how we're gonna do it.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was at a dinner the other night on like the future of databases. And one idea was like, databases essentially are like a retrieval mechanism for, for data. And, you know, you can put indexes so that they'll search across the data in certain formats, so a graph or or RAG. And then one of them, which was super interesting, was just like putting an agent on a loop to create the perfect data structure for the search. Like, if you're searching this data set this many times and it's taking 10 seconds, then why don't you just put an agent on a loop to create a new type of index or like find the best index for returning that in less than a second?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  I mean, dynamic retrieval is pretty clearly going to happen the second you have really, really smart code gen.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  So, I mean, for now, I mean, I use it for OpenClaw. So then, uh, I use my production instance and then the traces from that. I extracted out like a eval data set. And then I have a separate repo called G-Brain evals. And it's got 40 different categories of like specific types of retrieval, retrieval efficiency, like cost efficiency, latency. And then the cool thing about evals is then you can just tell the agent like loop, you know, just auto research and loop. And anything that improves your stats on this eval, like ship it into master on by default.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  And anything that you tried that didn't work, write a markdown file that, you know, explains why you think it didn't work and then file it away in G-Brain evals. I use Cappy, there's like, you know, Cappy has this concept of captains, which is kind of like similar to Grokbots bots. And so you can just give it a context. And so I have one that is always going, that's like come up with new categories. And I have another captain that's always going, that's like go through all the categories in evals and auto research. And every single day, try to find a way to improve our scores on our own internal evals. And that's just going all the time. It's a very, very primitive version of RSI for like a particular use case.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  But I guess if you like go up one level of abstraction, you know, you could do that, you know, not for my use case, which is from for OpenClaw or something like, it could just be for generically like anyone's retrieval use case. Like, the only thing that changes is like the use case and the traces and the data set.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  You obviously know about evals and you can improve your software because you have like wrapping this framework around it, like. Do you think that in the future builders will have to actually know about these type of things?

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Maybe not. I mean, honestly, I feel like we're so early that, you know, I'm just messing around. And, you know, I like doing it in open source and someone else, you know, I hope someone looks at that and says like, oh, I can apply that. You know, like we're, I think we're literally coming up with the primitives on how to use this stuff right now. Yeah. I mean, I remember earlier in the year, you know, reading about Steve Yegi's software factories and things like that. And then not being able to totally figure it out. And it's like, oh, no, no, I feel like now I've cobbled together something that works for me at least.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. When we had Boris Turney here, um, his vision of the future of coding was more like you just talk to Claude like a friend. You don't have to know about evals and all this, all this stuff. And like Claude just like figures out how to build the thing that you have in your mind.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  I've got this domain name, openusd.dev. And it's because there's actually a file format called openusd. And I collect domain names and then suddenly Stripe and Visa and everyone announced openusd. And I was like, oh, I better put this domain to use now, but I never had time to, to use it. So I was chatting to the dot and it's like, developed this like developer site with the ecosystem and everything. And I was just chatting to it on my computer. And then like, as I was winding down my day, I called it on my phone, like as I'm getting to bed, which sounds sus, but I'm, I promise I'm just

• 40:17Speaker 01

  Just checking in.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Just coding with it. And I was like, saying, I don't like the information architecture of how like the ecosystem links to the, the use cases. Can you make some suggestions? And it did. And I said, okay, yeah, implement them. And then 20 seconds later it said, oh yeah, okay, I've done it. Do you want to refresh? And I refreshed the site and it was really well written and everything was linking together and it's hooked up the SEO type stuff. And so I haven't done all the classic stuff that I'd have to do traditionally. I've just been chatting to it and it really felt like one of those moments where I was, I, I sort of saw a glimpse of the future.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  I mean, you can do that because you know what you want to build.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  That's the thing. Yeah. So like, I obviously have a background in engineering, so I kind of know how to prompt it. But I'm trying to not say anything. I'm trying not to like point it towards GitHub or anything like that. And I'm trying to code like a, like a normie or someone will do next year so that I know it's basically so I can dog food. Superbase and know that, oh, is it going to have a good time with Superbase in one year's time?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny for Boris to say like, oh, I, I just wanted to do it automatically. And like, certainly, once it's into distribution, like literally the model has it, you know, in its weights, it can do it. But until then, it needs like some markdown or so you just like a little, like not even a lot of prompting, like very small amounts of prompting. It can just do it. I, we're entering this very strange moment in society, I think, where like, uh, it sounds like RSI really is here. And it's like going from like the 20% to 80% moment of like AI research is just happening. In sort of these, inside these loops, inside, you know, Claude code or Codex or wherever it is.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  And then simultaneous to that, like, society doesn't really have enough people like you, Paul, who like know what to build and how to ask it. And so it's like unstoppable force meets immovable object right now. Like the capabilities, the models are like going parabolic. And then the number of people who know how to actually have an impact on society with it is like more or less constant.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And want to be kind of excited by it. I, I think that's the other thing. I, I think a lot of people are getting paranoid. But I'm genuinely excited about what the future could be for a lot of people. A lot of my previous startups were focused on like blue collar workers and like people who, I was wrapping tech around a lot of people who just had to work a lot of their life. You know, and I, the thing that I really love about Superbase is that it's, um, like I see a lot of entrepreneurship, um, because of the platform. And so I can see this future where actually there is going to be so much more entrepreneurship.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  And it's actually quite a fulfilling lifestyle for a lot of people. So I'm pretty pumped about 2027, actually. As long as we can keep this cadence up and avoid a few, few crazy events, then, then it should be a fun ride for a lot of people.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  We're seeing this moment where vertical SaaS founders actually are kind of struggling with raising series As. You know, when you're subscale at like, you know, five to 10 mil ARR even, which like historically is a lot of ARR. Like that's like a guaranteed series A, even like nine or 12 months ago. And today it's like, uh, I don't know, people are kind of like, not really into it, um, for vertical, like horizontal and AI investments, like seems like it's a totally green light. But like vertical SaaS people are really struggling, but it's also sort of happening right at the moment where you can get to 10 to 15 mil. You know, often 25, 30 mil, 50 mil with like 10 or 15 people.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  And so at that point, like you're very profitable at that point.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. With like, if you've got 15 people, 2 million ARR per head and with 50% margins, you're all making a million, million a year. I mean, that's an amazing outcome for, for a lot of people.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. And simultaneous to that, we just do a lot of office hours with people who do like, they got the brass ring. And then they're bummed out that they can't raise a series A. And so, you know, uh, many of my office hours there are just like, you're probably going to look back on this as a blessing. Cause you don't need the money. Like time was, you had to raise like a hundred million dollars to get to like 30 million a year in revenue. Cause you just had to hire all these people and now you don't have to do that.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. There's a real thing in startups, like the badge. I, I mean, it was the same for me, like to get funding at the start, like feel, felt like, you know, I was achieving something great. But actually, you know, to actually not fundraise now would in my mind be like, oh, that's achieving something great. So like, I'm a little bit envious of these companies that, that are getting to that point.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, it's a super changing world, but, um, your Superbase of all the companies has really been able to ride high through every single wave. Do you have any thoughts for people as they try to emulate what you've done?

• 45:34Speaker 02

  One thing that helps me sleep well at night is that it's kind of the Lindy effect. Databases have been around for 50 years. I'm, I think they'll be around for another 50 years. And this is one that at the end of AI, no matter what, I'm pretty certain there'll be databases. So apart from that, whatever you will, like, uh, you've got to choose categories that are very durable. And if you're going to bet your entire life, which is basically what I'm doing, you choose the category that you feel is worth investing in. I think the other one is like, things are changing so fast. So we don't try to have all the answers as Superbase. But we just try to make sure that we're always adapting the fastest.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  And, you know, for me, I've evaluated or like watched a lot of my favorite dev tools. They kind of start with the developer focus and then they always move up and they become very corporate and they kind of stagnate a lot. And they lose that, that love. And from our point of view, at least from my point of view, companies like Stripe, for example, they have this real, like, someone like a founder who just cares about like, almost focusing on what the new ways of building are. And so if you're like building for this next wave, you just always need to be one eye on the future of what is next, which is a very short timeline now.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Things are moving so fast, but, um, being super adaptable, um, and making sure you've got capacity within your team to shift very fast. That's the thing that we're, that we're focusing on for the next year.

• 47:15Speaker 00

  I think that you've like, maybe it's any specific things you've learned there, like, cause you've had, you know, maybe you had the initial vibe coding inflection point. And then the Opus 48 inflection point and just code gen, like when the next sort of wave, hopefully next, like many inflection point hit for you. But are there things that you'll, you'll do differently to be better prepared for it?

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, like dog fooding is one of the most important things, at least from our, um, perspective. So I'm always trying these tools with ours to know, ah, where are the gaps? There's no better feedback than you getting stuck on your own tooling. And then having capacity. So we try to partner with, with the, the key players in the space. And this ecosystem play has been really helpful because they give us feedback on what they're building so that, and we try to leave some capacity within the team, which is also very difficult. But, um, so that when they have ideas, we can, we can give it a shot. And not a lot of the bets actually win, even when they seem like we're partnering together to do some new cool thing.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  We actually don't know. They might sound cool and we try them out and they, they, they kind of flop. But the ones that do work then end up meaning that we ride this awesome wave together.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  That's a great note to end on. Paul, thanks so much, man. We'll see you guys next time.