Kyle Mathews

Big announcement! I'm now a co-founder at @electricsql along with the @thruflo / @balegas and the brilliant team they've built. We're solving local caching of Postgres data. Electric is a VC-backed devtools OSS startup. We're close to our first beta release so check us out!

Claude has more positive / negative variance than Codex — it's pushes back or extends my ideas in really interesting ways. But it also feels free to "creatively" edit my specs to avoid doing tons of work. Codex is a boring and plodding thinker but executes plans precisely.

"Hurt" is not an original by Johnny Cash. The song was written by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) in 1994 for the album The Downward Spiral. Rick Rubin had to insist several times on Cash recording his version, at first Johnny found the idea completely insane because the original version is industrial and noisy. At 71, already very ill, almost blind and with trembling hands, Cash completely transformed the band. The iconic video, directed by Mark Romanek, was filmed at the House of Cash (his own museum). June Carter Cash appears looking at him fondly, the video was shot in February 2003, a few months before she died (May) and Johnny himself (September). Trent Reznor was so moved that he declared, "This song is not mine anymore." It is considered one of the best covers of all time.

@benswerd @dexhorthy Sometimes agents will need sandboxes and others will be doing fairly routine standardized stuff and won't. So sandboxed are a tool (along with code mode style v8 isolates) agents can reach to when they need open ended exploration and tool building.

@benswerd @dexhorthy No yeah there's tons of value in letting agents just go at stuff. Our belief is there'll be huge quantities of agents. Every employee might have thousands of agents along with tons of automated ones.

1. The world needs managed agents. Every major platform shipped one in the last six weeks — Anthropic, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, LangChain. The demand is real and the consensus is set. 🧵

@bishaltwt Generally what I do is to tell the agent to add links to skills in my agents.md

IMO this approach works really nicely with all agents, I am sure you guyz must be thinking about this, I don't know what would be the ideal solution for this but can we use the post install script to maybe create a symlink between node_modules docs and .agents/skills file ?

I really like the idea of tanstack intent i.e shipping skills along with the library, for users of library this means they don't have to go around looking for a perfect skill everytime they install a new package, i can have it directly from the authors, 😍

@dexhorthy @benswerd Sold! DMing

@kylemathews You should hang out with @benswerd when you’re in town

8. Pick the substrate that's on the right side of every curve. Cost going up. Scale going up. Latency budget going down. Multi-agent going mainstream. Build serverless agents on functions and streams. We built Electric Agents so you don't have to.

7. None of this means sandboxes are bad. They're the right primitive when an agent genuinely needs a computer to play in — code execution, browser automation, arbitrary tool installation. Sandboxes as tool targets: yes. Sandboxes as the agent runtime: no.

@yochowgwo @tonboio @ElectricSQL @loro_dev Nice. Have you seen Tanstack DB with its persistence layer? It can run in e.g. a serverless function with state in sqlite and spin up as needed to process updates

similar, but not that heavy. If all the state during the computation is stored on durable streams, it is sufficient to make it a serverless durable execution. So WASM compute on streams is basically what I was referring to as durable execution. it would be extended to a serverless agent runtime if we had a kind of computation support on durable streams(sessions)

Just open-sourced Ursula: an HTTP event streams server. Built on @ElectricSQL's Durable Streams Protocol, Ursula keeps a combo we have not seen elsewhere: { Apache 2.0, quorum-replicated, sub-50ms p99, S3 economics }. github.com/tonbo-io/ursula

Anthropic's managed agents hold a similar view: no replayable/rewindable sandbox is needed, the execution environment can be ephemeral, and agents are able to use its historical session records for reconstruct the environment anthropic.com/engineering/ma…

@confusedqubit @HeyGarrison 🔥

@kylemathews @HeyGarrison If your infra provider doesn’t scale, they’re not a serious provider

If you want to run 100k concurrent agents... you're not going to want run them in sandboxes. (hint, check out Electric Agents)

@HeyGarrison @confusedqubit Of course the next question is what about a million concurrent agents 😎😂

@confusedqubit @kylemathews This is a question worth answering too!! Not all can do it

@joodalooped The millions part? That's probably not very common. But multiple people/agents is useful for multiplayer agentic apps and for multi-agent orchestration

@kylemathews do you have examples of when this is useful for AI stuff?

prediction: event sourcing-style stuff is about to get more popular

@joodalooped A log that can support millions of processes tailing it in real time 😎

Electric Agents is built on Electric Streams, which in turn is "just a log" x.com/kylemathews/st…