Declarative schemas give agents a direct view of database state

Transcript

From the transcript Latent Space publishes with the episode.

1. 59:19

   This exists today- Okay... if you use the RC LI. So it's a virtual file system Uh, like, it's a representation of... It's like infrastructure as code. Okay. Yeah. And in fact, what we're announcing tomorrow is, like, we've done our kind of final change for declarative schemas. This was a, a really challenging one actually, covering all of Postgres. And so now you can have a full file representation of Postgres, uh, the shape of your database declaratively in your folder.

2. 59:46

   That's really important for agents, 'cause generally how you operate with Postgres is you have a migration file every time you make a change. You add a file to this migrations folder, and it's like a historical log. Okay, so that's great. It's industry standard. But imagine putting an agent across a thousand files and telling, asking it, "Oh, what is the shape of this table?" It has to guess through 1,000 files, so- It has to recompile basically- It has to recompile... edit weights, yeah. Or you have to launch the database, um, locally- Migrate, migrate, migrate, migrate...

3. 1:00:15

   run the migrations up, and then you inspect, introspect the database. But that's too slow. So basically what we want to do is turn the schemas folder inside our, our Supabase folder into a completely declarative state of your database. And so we've captured everything from tables, policies, uh, database comments, all inside these files. So we're releasing a new library, pgdelta. You can use it with any Postgres database.

4. 1:00:40

   Um, but we've got mechanisms for the, for Supabase. And so this is an important step for agents. We know that agents are gonna operate mostly on code. They don't wanna reach out to anything. They've gotta iterate very fast on the file system. So that's fine, and today people are using CLIs. They're happy with these harnesses. What I suspect we're moving more towards is, like, at the moment I'm trying to do some development just on my mobile phone, for example, and I'm quite comfortably able to do it.

5. 1:01:10

   Of course, I know what's going on behind the scenes, so I'm telling it things that I know it has to do from an infrastructure point of view. But we're getting to a state where I can imagine you don't need to be an engineer. You, you have an idea, you say to your phone, your dot or whatever personal agent you have- [chuckles]... "I want to build X," and one second later, you kind of have this application live. You can iterate on, on it yourself.

6. 1:01:36

   So these are the things that I'm thinking, "Okay, what are the use cases that people are going to want if this is the case? Is it personalized? What do we care about? Are these things gonna scale up? What are the mechanisms? How are we going to develop, and what tooling do we need to provide to make sure that we are the default provider in this new world?" Any questions that you're, you're interested in, uh, as for a crystal ball into the future? As someone who's been a software engineer now for, like, a few decades,