"We are clearly entering a world where a product-minded engineer is now empowered to produce software without writing a line of code for it." In this conversation, Temporal CEO Samar Abbas joins a16z GPs Sarah Wang and Raghu Raghuram to cover: - Why agents are going from short-lived and interactive to long-running and async - Why the engineer of the future manages 15 parallel AI tasks at once - How OpenAI Codex runs millions of concurrent agent executions on Temporal - How real-time context engineering is exploding on Temporal - Why SaaS isn't dead, and value is migrating to APIs 00:00 Introduction 04:03 Temporal's origin story 11:14 Why agents raise the stakes 16:00 Specialized agents need durable RPC 25:20 Deep research agents 30:58 Execution histories as a superpower 39:04 Minimal viable long-running agent architecture 45:07 Context engineering at scale 52:40 Where value accrues: The "five-layer cake" and breakout AI applications @SamarAtTemporal @sarahdingwang @RaghuRaghuram
