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Join Luke Wroblewski and Ben Lorica as they talk about the future of software development. What happens when we have databases that are designed to interact with agents and language models rather than humans? We’re starting to see what that world will look like. It’s an exciting time to be a software developer.
About the Generative AI in the Real World podcast: In 2023, ChatGPT put AI on everyone’s agenda. In 2025, the challenge will be turning those agendas into reality. In Generative AI in the Real World, Ben Lorica interviews leaders who are building with AI. Learn from their experience to help put AI to work in your enterprise.
Check out other episodes of this podcast on the O’Reilly learning platform.
Timestamps
- 0:00: Introduction to Luke Wroblewski of Sutter Hill Ventures.
- 0:36: You’ve talked about a paradigm shift in how we write applications. You’ve said that all we need is a URL and model, and that’s an app. Has anyone else made a similar observation? Have you noticed substantial apps that look like this?
- 1:08: The future is here; it’s just not evenly distributed yet. That’s what everyone loves to say. The first websites looked nothing like robust web applications, and now we have a multimedia podcast studio running in the browser. We’re at the phase where some of these things look and feel less robust. And our ideas for what constitutes an application change in each of these phases. If I told you pre-Google Maps that we’d be running all of our web applications in a browser, you’d have laughed at me.
- 2:13: I think what you mean is an MCP server, and the model itself is the application, correct?
- 2:24: Yes. The current definition of an application, in a simple form, is running code and a database. We’re at the stage where you have AI coding agents that can handle the coding part. But we haven’t really had databases that have been designed for the way those agents think about code and interacting with data.
- 2:57: Now that we have databases that work the way agents work, you can take out the running-code part almost. People go to Lovable or Cursor and they’re forced to look at code syntax. But if an AI model can just use a database effectively, it takes the role of the running code. And if it can manage data visualizations and UI, you don’t need to touch the code. You just need to point the AI at a data structure it can use effectively. MCP UI is a nice example of people pushing in this direction.
- 4:12: Which brings us to something you announced recently: AgentDB. You can find it at agentdb.dev. What problem is AgentDB trying to solve?
- 4:34: Related to what we were just talking about: How do we get AI agents to use databases effectively? Most things in the technology stack are made for humans and the scale at which humans operate.
- 5:06: They’re still designed for a DBA, but eliminating the command line, right? So you still have to have an understanding of DBA principles?
- 5:19: How do you pick between the different compute options? How do you pick a region? What are the security options? And it’s not something you’re going to do thousands of times a day. Databricks just shared some stats where they said that thousands of databases per agent get made a day. They think 99% of databases being made are going to be made by agents. What is making all these databases? No longer humans. And the scale at which they make them—thousands is a lowball number. It will be way, way higher than that. How do we make a database system that works in that reality?
- 6:22: So the high-level thesis here is that lots of people will be creating agents, and these agents will rely on something that looks like a database, and many of these people won’t be hardcore engineers. What else?
- 6:45: It’s also agents creating agents, and agents creating applications, and agents deciding they need a database to complete a task. The explosion of these smart machine uses and workflows is well underway. But we don’t have an infrastructure that was made for that world. They were all designed to work with humans.
- 7:31: So in the classic database world, you’d consider AgentDB more like OLTP rather than analytics and OLAP.
- 7:42: Yeah, for analytics you’d probably stick your log somewhere else. The characteristics that make AgentDB really interesting for agents is, number 1: To create a database, all you really need is a unique ID. The creation of the ID manifests a database out of thin air. And we store it as a file, so you can scale like crazy. And all of these databases are fully isolated. They’re also downloadable, deletable, releasable—all the characteristics of a filesystem. We also have the concept of a template that comes along with the database. That gives the AI model or agent all the context it needs to start using the database immediately. If you just point Claude at a database, it will need to look at the structure (schema). It will build tokens and time trying to get the structure of the information. And every time it does this is an opportunity to make a mistake. With AgentDB, when an agent or an AI model is pointed at the database with a template, it can immediately write a query because we have in there a description of the database, the schema. So you save time, cut down errors, and don’t have to go through that learning step every time the model touches a database.
- 10:22: I assume this database will have some of the features you like, like ACID, vector search. So what kinds of applications have people built using AgentDB?
- 10:53: We put up a little demo page where we allow you to start the process with a CSV file. You upload it, and it will create the database and give you an MCP URL. So people are doing things like personal finance. People are uploading their credit card statements, their bank statements, because those applications are horrendous.
- 11:39: So it’s the actual statement; it parses it?
- 11:45: Another example: Someone has a spreadsheet to track jobs. They can take that, upload it, it gives them a template and a database and an MCP URL. They can pop that job-tracking database into Claude and do all the things you can do with a chat app, like ask, “What did I look at most recently?”
- 12:35: Do you envision it more like a DuckDB, more embedded, not really intended for really heavy transactional, high-throughput, more-than-one-table complicated schemas?
- 12:49: We currently support DuckDB and SQLite. But there are a bunch of folks who have made multiple table apps and databases.
- 13:09: So it’s not meant for you to build your own CRM?
- 13:18: Actually, one of our go-to-market guys had data of people visiting the website. He can dump that as a spreadsheet. He has data of people starring repos on GitHub. He has data of people who reached out through this form. He has all of these inbound signals of customers. So he took those, dropped them in as CSV files, put it in Claude, and then he can say, “Look at these, search the web for information about these, add it to the database, sort it by priority, assign it to different reps.” It’s CRM-ish already, but super-customized to his particular use case.
- 14:27: So you can create basically an agentic Airtable.
- 14:38: This means if you’re building AI applications or databases—traditionally that has been somewhat painful. This removes all that friction.
- 15:00: Yes, and it leads to a different way of making apps. You take that CSV file, you take that MCP URL, and you have a chat app.
- 15:17: Even though it’s accessible to regular users, it’s something developers should consider, right?
- 15:25: We’re starting to see emergent end-user use cases, but what we put out there is for developers.
- 15:38: One of the other things you’ve talked about is the notion that software development has flipped. Can you explain that to our listeners?
- 15:56: I spent eight and a half years at Google, four and a half at Yahoo, two and a half at ebay, and your traditional process of what we’re going to do next is up front: There’s a lot of drawing pictures and stuff. We had to scope engineering time. A lot of the stuff was front-loaded to figure out what we were going to build. Now with things like AI agents, you can build it and then start thinking about how it integrates inside the project. At a lot of our companies that are working with AI coding agents, I think this naturally starts to happen, that there’s a manifestation of the technology that helps you think through what the design should be, how do we integrate into the product, should we launch this? This is what I mean by “flipped.”
- 17:41: If I’m in a company like a big bank, does this mean that engineers are running ahead?
- 17:55: I don’t know if it’s happening in big banks yet, but it’s definitely happening in startup companies. And design teams have to think through “Here’s a bunch of stuff, let me do a wash across all that to fit in,” as opposed to spending time designing it earlier. There are pros and cons to both of these. The engineers were cleaning up the details in the previous world. Now the opposite is true: I’ve built it, now I need to design it.
- 18:55: Does this imply a new role? There’s a new skill set that designers have to develop?
- 19:07: There’s been this debate about “Should designers code?” Over the years lots of things have reduced the barrier to entry, and now we have an even more dramatic reduction. I’ve always been of the mindset that if you understand the medium, you will make better things. Now there’s even less of a reason not to do it.
- 19:50: Anecdotally, what I’m observing is that the people who come from product are able to build something, but I haven’t heard as many engineers thinking about design. What are the AI tools for doing that?
- 20:19: I hear the same thing. What I hope remains uncommoditized is taste. I’ve found that it’s very hard to teach taste to people. If I have a designer who is a good systems thinker but doesn’t have the gestalt of the visual design layer, I haven’t been able to teach that to them. But I have been able to find people with a clear sense of taste from diverse design backgrounds and get them on board with interaction design and systems thinking and applications.
- 21:02: If you’re a young person and you’re skilled, you can go into either design or software engineering. Of course, now you’re reading articles saying “forget about software engineering.” I haven’t seen articles saying “forget about design.”
- 21:31: I disagree with the idea that it’s a bad time to be an engineer. It’s never been more exciting.
- 21:46: But you have to be open to that. If you’re a curmudgeon, you’re going to be in trouble.
- 21:53: This happens with every technical platform transition. I spent so many years during the smartphone boom hearing people say, “No one is ever going to watch TV and movies on mobile.” Is it an affinity to the past, or a sense of doubt about the future? Every time, it’s been the same thing.
- 22:37: One way to think of AgentDB is like a wedge. It addresses one clear pain point in the stack that people have to grapple with. So what’s next? Is it Kubernetes?
- 23:09: I don’t want to go near that one! The broader context of how applications are changing—how do I create a coherent product that people understand how to use, that has aesthetics, that has a personality?—is a very wide-open question. There’s a bunch of other systems that have not been made for AI models. A simple example is search APIs. Search APIs are basically structured the same way as results pages. Here’s your 10 blue links. But an agentic model can suck up so much information. Not only should you be giving it the web page, you should be giving it the whole site. Those systems are not built for this world at all. You can go down the list of the things we use as core infrastructure and think about how they were made for a human, not the capabilities of an enormous large language model.
- 24:39: Right now, I’m writing an article on enterprise search, and one of things people don’t realize is that it’s broken. In terms of AgentDB, do you worry about things like security, governance? There’s another place black hat attackers can go after.
- 25:20: Absolutely. All new technologies have the light side and the dark side. It’s always been a codebreaker-codemaker stack. That doesn’t change. The attack vectors are different and, in the early stages, we don’t know what they are, so it is a cat and mouse game. There was an era when spam in email was terrible; your mailbox would be full of spam and you manually had to mark things as junk. Now you use gmail, and you don’t think about it. When was the last time you went into the junk mail tab? We built systems, we got smarter, and the average person doesn’t think about it.
- 26:31: As you have more people building agents, and agents building agents, you have data governance, access control; suddenly you have AgentDB artifacts all over the place.
- 27:06: Two things here. This is an underappreciated part of this. Two years ago I launched my own personal chatbot that works off my writings. People ask me what model am I using, and how is it built? Those are partly interesting questions. But the real work in that system is constantly looking at the questions people are asking, and evaluating whether or not it responded well. I’m constantly course-correcting the system. That’s the work that a lot of people don’t do. But the thing I’m doing is applying taste, applying a perspective, defining what “good” is. For a lot of systems like enterprise search, it’s like, “We deployed the technology.” How do you know if it’s good or not? Is someone in there constantly tweaking and tuning? What makes Google Search so good? It’s constantly being re-evaluated. Or Google Translate—was this translation good or bad? Baked in early on.
