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Lightcone · 2 min · Oct 30, 2026
Supabase lets engineers choose their AI tools
Paul Copplestone says Supabase has no internal AI policy and lets engineers choose their tools.
In this episode
Full episode- 9:55AI makes a personal database useful to everyonePro pick 7 min
- 32:18Agent memory turns into a retrieval problemPro pick 6 min
- 19:55Supabase moved from dashboards to code as agents arrived3 min
- 23:31Supabase wants to win startups on day one and scale with them3 min
- 29:42Supabase makes errors actionable for coding agents3 min
- 17:53Supabase lets engineers choose their AI tools2 min
- 43:21Small SaaS teams can make fundraising optional2 min
- 45:25Supabase uses dogfooding and team capacity to adapt3 min
“we don't have an ai policy internally we just let people do whatever they whatever they want”
Takeaways
- Engineers choose which AI tools to use.
- Adoption grew as engineers saw models produce better work.
- More AI-written code increased the focus on testing.
About this segment
Paul Copplestone says Supabase has no internal AI policy and lets engineers choose their tools. As confidence in models grew, adoption rose and testing became more important.
Paul Copplestone is cofounder and CEO of Supabase.
Garry Tan, Host · President & CEO, Y Combinator
Co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase backer.
Harj Taggar, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator
Co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers and later Triplebyte.
Diana Hu, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator
CTO of Escher Reality; after Niantic bought it, ran AR for Pokémon GO.
Jared Friedman, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator
Co-founded Scribd, which YC funded in 2006; has advised 20+ YC unicorns.
From “Why Everyone Is About To Have Their Own Database”, Oct 30, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 17:57
one so you ran a poll recently uh where people went from 10 of your engineers were writing 80 of their code with uh 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 is this going from here 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 vibe coded type stuff they're pretty intense um 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
- 18:58
been pretty useful to make sure that they actually know that the end result is going to be good yeah we're seeing that across yc the yc startups like uh blacksmith depot ubicloud like they're all vertical because everyone's doing ci yeah and the number of tests that you have are just like through reptile for like review so that's pretty wild honestly to see was it like a pretty like it's just the models are good enough now and yeah like people spend enough time where they're like oh actually this is quite good and people need to be convinced especially uh 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 navier stokes and all these stuff like convincing
- 19:48
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 you've seen super based like