The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Agents in the database (Interview)

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

Ajay Kulkarni from Tiger Data (Co-founder/CEO) is on the pod this week with Adam. He asked him to get vulnerable and trace his path to becoming a CEO. They dig into the themes that have shaped his career, and explore how founder values end up forming company culture (whether you intend them to or not). From his enterprise days to building Timescale (and the rename to Tiger Data), we cover the whole journey — even the haters, because haters gonna hate. Here's where it gets really interesting: Agents in the database! Not the hype. The real thing baby. They get into how fast you can go from idea to shipped these days, what it actually means to talk to your database, and the whole API/CLI/MCP/Skills movement.

Well, friends, this is the ChangeLog. I'm Adam Stukoviac, editor-in-chief here at changelow.com. And today on the show, I'm talking to AJ called Carney, co-founder and CEO of Tiger Data. We trace his path to becoming a CEO. We dig into the themes that have shaped his career. And we explore how founder values end up forming company culture. From his enterprise days to building timescale, renaming to Tiger Data. We cover the whole journey.

and here's where it gets really, really interesting. Agents in the database. Not the hype, the real thing. The real thing, baby. We get into how fast you can go from idea to ship these days, what it actually means to talk to your database, and the whole API, CLI, MCP skills landscape we're all working in. A J drops this gym, build skills, not agents,

and we unpack that in this episode. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at fly. That is the home of change law.com. It can be your home too. Learn more at fly.io. Okay, let's talk agents in the database. Well, friends, I'm here with a good friend of mine. Again, Kyle Galbraith, co-founder and CEO of Depot.Dev.

Kyle, we are in an era of disruption, right? I would also describe it as rethinking, what we thought was true. And I guess that's kind of the definition of disruption. But from your perspective, how are teams, reliability teams, CISD, pipeline teams, how are they all rethinking things?

And where does Depot fit into that? In the conversations that I have with customers, a lot of DevOps teams, platform teams, site reliability teams, they're really looking at this new era of software engineering that we're all living in. And they're starting to question, like, the bottleneck is no longer the act of writing code.

The bottleneck is shifting. The most time-consuming part is integrating the code. It's everything that comes after. It's the build. It's the pull request review. It's the deployment. It's the getting it into production. Once it's in productions, it's scaling up support teams to support it.

It's adding documentation. All of these downstream problems. And so through the lens of Depot, what we're really starting to think about is there's a very realistic possibility that within the next two to three years, maybe even sooner, that we're going to enter a world where an engineering team of three people could theoretically have the velocity of an engineering team of 300 people. And what's the consequences of that? What's the consequences of the code velocity spiking up to that level with such a small team?

There's no way three engineers are going to be able to code review all of the code that's being created if there's three engineers and 297 agents also grading features and fixing bugs. So that's just like from a poll request perspective. But then you think about it through a build lens too of if your builds take 20 minutes with three humans and now you're going to have three humans and 297 agents also running. Well, like you definitely don't want your builds taking 20 minutes because now like the entire pinch point is the build pipeline. And so we're starting to think a lot about how do we eliminate the bottlenecks that come downstream and what can we do with Depot that streamlines that?

So obviously, friends, we are in an era of disruption. Things are changing, you know it, I know it, and that's how it is. And the thing with production and what Kyle's talking about here is, how in the world do you get your bills to be faster? How do you get them to be more reliable, faster, more observability around those deployments? You need it. It's required. And Depot is there to help you. So a good first step is to go to depot.dev, get faster.

Try their trial. It's too easy. Again, depo. dot dev is where to go. It all begins at depot. Dev. So friends, we're here with a Jay Culkarnie, a new friend of mine from Tiger Data, previously Timescale.

We've had this relationship. We work with you as a sponsor. And I've been a fan, obviously, of Time Series Data. And I had ideas for you all. I've been working with Isabel behind the scenes. And then it finally came back to this moment here where you have agentic postgres, which is just super interesting to me. So I thought we would dive deep into who you are, AJ,

what your journey might be and how you've come to love building databases. So let's start there. Yeah, yeah. I'll try to give you the short. I assume you love building databases. You know, I love building. Yeah, okay. I love building and I love solving problems.

Now, databases are interesting, right? But, you know, it would not be the only thing I, you know, done in my career. You know, I've been in love of technology since I was a kid. And I remember using the Internet for the first time in high school at 1995, 1996, and thinking, I don't know what this is, but this is fun. Yeah. And I was pre-med at that point applying to colleges. And I switched to computer science, went to MIT. And I guess the rest, yeah, is history.

MIT is where I met my co-founder, by the way. So that's how we know each other for 28 years. That's wild to know a co-founder of 28 years. I mean, the history and the level of trust and maybe somewhat antitrust. It's not antitrust, but you know what it is? It's... When he and I started working together at this point, probably 10 years ago, like, I remember thinking, I know what I like about Mike and I know what I don't like about him.

Okay. And I want to work with this guy. And I'm sure he felt similarly. And I think it's a little bit of like a, I'm not sure I want to call it a spouser relationship, but almost, you know, what you're like, hey, like, I like you, I like you, I like you, for who you are the whole package, even though sometimes that package annoys me. And I'm sure you say the same thing about me. Well, Mike is not here, so we can't speak for him. But I'm assuming he might say something like that. So CEO of Tiger Data, you were under a different name, a different moniker before.

I do want to go there, but I kind of want to zoom back out a second just to kind of identify who you are. But, you know, more so how you got here. You mentioned MIT, Long Road, 20 years knowing Mike, met him at college, university. You know, what was the journey from there to go into, I suppose, your career? And what are some of the things you've done that you really feel have defined or identified who you are today? Yeah, I think I've tried to always follow the thing that kind of, tugs my heartstrings to be like, hey, like, I don't know why, but this is interesting. And really, to listen to that.

That's why I ended up at MIT, my high school guidance counselor tried to dissuade me from going. And I was like, no, I'm going to go. I'm going to go, you know. I want to do this. And, no, it was hard, but it was great. I graduated during the dot-com collapse. So at that point, tech was not hiring.

And which just sounds crazy at this point, you know, the, and I ended up on Wall Street as a bond analyst. But very quickly, after a couple of years, I ended up back in Palo Alto working for a startup. And I've been working at startup since. What year was that? Roughly. That's back to Palo. Oh, back to Palo Alto. 2004.

Okay. I know exactly what I was doing that year. I was so wayward then. that was the beginning of my developer career I would say so not that this is my story but just so you kind of understand the cloth there the timing

that was the same year my daughter was born she is now 21 so that's 21 years ago for you almost 22 as of this January if that was the case for you too congrats that's incredible thank you yeah I was in Canada at the time oddly enough I'm an American

I'm in the States served our military I don't say that as like a nationalist necessarily. Where did you serve? In the army, but just to say that I'm not Canadian. Not that I'm against me.

I'm just not Canadian. So I want to be clear about that. Some people think because I lived in Canada for a bit, they're like, are you Canadian? I'm like, no, no, no. I don't say a boot. Probably because you're so friendly. People are like,

oh, you must be Canadian. Well, yeah. Maybe that's, maybe that's it. But I was fresh. So I didn't go to college or to MIT or to a computer. computer science, uh, school or get a degree in that I, I learned by messing with geo cities that same year. And, uh, that's so funny to even think about sort of playing with WordPress, got a job

and almost got fired from a company called IT weapons, still around in Canada, ITWeapons.com. One of the most formative moments in my career, I got hired into a sales role. I could not do well because their sales style was so different from what I was used to. And I was terrible at that job. And I knew I was like so close to getting fired. And I took it upon myself to be like, nah, man, you're not getting rid of me, almost like you were with your guidance counselor.

I'm going to do this. And so I defined the business development role for the company and started to add value beyond what they thought that I could add. And they never really told me directly that I was like minutes away from getting fired. But I knew it. I knew it my soul, but I also saw the turnaround and the benefit there. And it was, it was pretty awesome. So anyways.

I know. I like that story because I feel like that is something you don't know you have until it's tested. Yeah. Which is the, hey. I didn't know I had it, Jay. I was like, what do you? I had a wife and a brand new daughter coming, you know, so in that in those moments. So like that time frame for me, I could not, I could not not survive.

I had to find a way. It's, I think that's, I think it's some combination of grit, but also just like an FU mentality. Yeah, I was like, listen, oh, no, no, no, no. I'm, I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to figure it out. Yeah. So I've always been good at connecting the value dots, I would say. You can call it sales if you want to.

And I think that's the easy, you know, in quotes, word you can use. But I really think I'm, I have this uncanny ability to, and I've just grown into it in my career and I've leaned into it where I've been able to connect the dots between things that just aren't normally connected and express and redefine and help shape that value in those connected dots. That's great. I like that story. Let's go back to you though.

This is not about me. I thought we'd at least encapsulate what was happening in 2004 between our lives. So much different perspectives, right? But similar, I would say, like, I'm not a co-founder or a CEO of a tech. startup, but certainly a tech brand, right? Changelaw.com has been around. We're an institution at this point, 18 years at Jay. We started in 2009.

I mean, in the tech industry, that's like 100 years. That is. You know, we're on Wikipedia, basically, but not really. I'm just kidding. Wikipedia is the eighth, ninth, tenth, one of the world, one of those two things or three things. Yeah. So I'll tell you what's been the theme in my career is that when I was on Wall Street,

it was a really interesting like an eye-opening experience because I was around some really smart people I was like I was a quant around people who all had PhDs some had multiple PhDs really hardworking it wasn't like it was a it was a meritocracy it wasn't like a lot of face time I mean you would work but it was you know and I was paid really well but I didn't like it I didn't like it and I was like you know what I feel like this is not who I am and I felt like I was someone who needed to build and needed to create and I actually I remember going soul searching. Like, hey, should I go into consumer package goods?

Should I go into, at one point I thought about starting like a record label because I'm like, I like I like music and I like business. So maybe I'll start a record label. I remember by a book about it and during research. And at some point I started a chocolate company. And I kind of realized, and it's kind of obvious in hindsight, that like, dude, like if you want to build something to make an impact, like tech. is the best way.

Yeah. I mean, even more so now, but even back then. And so I think, I think that's what kind of brought me to tech. And I think that's what keeps fueling me is like, yeah, just the ability to have a positive impact in the world and on other people. And it's not always fun. It's not always easy. But I think that's probably the main thing that's been driving me at least since that insight. Can you expose some scars?

some some hard years some some bad choices that you can not reflect on that are formative to who you are today kind of like what I did with you a little bit yeah so you mean like life choices yeah we're the forks in the road that you're like man that's that's the moment where I learned this hard lesson or that's the moment I know you mentioned Mike in 20 years so maybe that's one of those forks but just those moments where you look back now and in the moment you know it's kind of funny because in the moment sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees, right? And we think like this choice or this thing happening is the end of the world. It's the biggest choice ever. And it may be in that moment, but when you get past it, you sort of get past it with hindsight.

And that's why it is truly 2020 because you go back with so much clarity. What were some of those moments for you when it was unclear, a choice you had to make? But now it's like, it's clearly defined who you are today. As a mistake or a good choice? You pick. Whatever you, whichever direction you want to go. I feel like mistakes are more interesting. Scars, buddy knuckles, they, you know, sometimes mistakes can be either or sometimes the positive choice we make can be either or a scar or a buddy knuckle. I mean, look, I think you probably know those. Entrepreneurship is a series of mistakes.

And the key is just like not letting the company die despite your mistakes. There's many I've made over the years, you know, bad hires. ambassador to chief decisions. I'll tell you one actually that started even before then. I used to work at this company, and I won't mention you because I'm not trying to throw anyone out of the bus, but I used to work at this company where I was in charge of an engineering team, and somehow, like I thought I was on track to get more responsibility,

and somehow there was this internal upward. And I realized people didn't like me. And it was uproar and I ended up getting sidelined. And that heard for a couple of reasons. Number one, I'm kind of a sensitive guy. You know, like, yeah, I'm an entrepreneur. But I'm like, look, dude, like, you know, if you genuinely don't like me, I'd be like, like, like, why? You know, because I'm like, I'm curious because I'm like, you know, did I do anything to offend you, you know? But also like, I was just caught off guard. And what I realizes that part of that was my fault. Part of that was like, I think I came across more like dictator-like than I intended. But part was, I would say, maybe indirectly my fault

where there were some decisions that were made where I took the heat for where it wasn't actually it wasn't the decision that I made. I guess, I don't know, maybe, you know, I guess a long story, I kind of realize that, you know, I think I changed my style. But I also realize that you have to look out for yourself, you know, and your, your manager, whoever, like, they will not necessarily look out for you. But also conversely, I've tried to be the type of manager who looks out for people. I don't know. That's an interesting story, Adam, but like. Well, so let's zoom into maybe how are you changed as a result?

Like, what did you do to where I'm trying to go to is how did you get here? You know, in terms of not just where you're at in this moment, but like the person you are leading the company you are, what are some of the things that were in your past or in your choice line that has now helped a J today be a J to lead? Yeah, I would say that I've made, you know, much you want to call them mistakes or just, you know, I've had learning experiences over the years. and I think that I've formed who I am today. I think the key theme, and this is not all of them, but I think one key theme is I have learned how to trust myself. Like, I remember early on I would make some hires, for example, in sales that didn't like gut feel right to me.

But, you know, I was new to enterprise sales. I was new to the database business. And in hindsight, like, my gut was very. right. My gut was right that, like, hey, the general, you know, I like to say in a fast-moving industry, expertise is a liability. So, like, in the database, well, as the databases were moving from enterprise sales and on-prem to, like, cloud and PLG, the people who could sell this would be totally the wrong people for this. And I kind of felt that, but I couldn't articulate it. And I made a hire and made a few hires that, you know, I had to let go. And

that's my fault. That's on me. But I think that that's one thing that taught me that, like, hey, like, you got this far for a reason, like listen to your gut. And if you can't articulate it, then try to take the time to articulate it. I think more recently, like, look, I, you know, I have a conversational style that myself, my both Mike and I, we talk about this. It's called cooperative overlapping. It essentially means that we interrupt a lot, you know, but we interrupt because that's how we talk.

Like if you interrupted me, I feed on that, you feed on, you know. Yeah. And one thing we realize is that, like, like, well, at one point there was some people, you know, on my executive team who were like, we need to interrupt less. And I remember thinking, my first thought was, you're right, we should interrupt less. And my second thought was like, no, this is who we are, you know, like, like, we got this far for who we are, you know, and either, you know, at a company, either you ask the founders to change

or you ask the whole company to change, you know? Yeah. And when I realize is that there are people in the company who like that. who we are. They like that we interrupted, you know? And so I got at the point, I was like, hey, you know what? Like, you know, we talk about like California mentality versus New York mentality. Like, New York mentality is, hey, I'll be kind to you, but I may not be nice. Like, like, I'll be gruff on the street, but I'll help you. And that's just the New York way. And if you're in New York, you have to realize that. That when people are like too busy to talk

to you is not, they're not being rude, they're actually trying to be respectful of your time. So, yeah, I think like, I don't know, I feel like over the years not trusting my own instinct has, I mean, you live with the consequences. And so I think I've learned that like, hey, just trust your instinct because whether you win or lose, it's on you. Yeah. One thing I wrote down a while back, this is actually 2012, September 2012. And it was the question of where does a company's culture come from? And essentially, it's bowled down to what you just said with there, which is a founder's values and principles define the company's culture. And so these things, they kind of, they're top down in the way.

But if you don't have, I guess, fortitude in who you are and why you are the way you are to push back when somebody says, hey, maybe that's not cool. And you're like, you know, I can kind of see that. But at the same time, it's kind of who I am. And here's why I'm delivering my message this way or why the way I speak this this way. And it's less about, you know, interrupting, but more about that cooperative, what you call cooperative overlap. Is that right? Cooperative overlapping.

Yeah. That's the technical term. And so it does put a name to it, the tame it. So it's not interruption. It's, it's meant to be a courteous interrupt to probably provoke deeper conversation or to provoke more collaboration and involvement right now and that probably the reason no no no totally but it's i think it's also a function of like don't try to shore up your weaknesses try to lean on your strengths yeah right so like like i am a an intense person when i was younger i would feel bad about it because

some people like oh whoa you're intense but now i'm like no it's just who i am and some people love that about me yeah and there's some things i can do really well because i am in intense you know So I am. You know, like, if you don't like that, but cool, you know, we don't have to work together, right? You know, similarly, like, like, I, you know, I talk a little fast. Like, I remember at one point, like, I was giving a presentation and, like, so my peers were like, oh, why don't you slow down? You're talking really fast. And I slowed down and they were like, no, this is worse.

Like, it was better when you talk fast because your energy was there, you know? And I was like, you know what? Yeah, like, I talk fast and maybe it's like, you know, maybe I'm. might muddle some words sometimes, but like that is Hawaii and that's how my energy comes through and just lean on that. I haven't talked, I talked about the with Mike. It's like, we both have weaknesses. We both have flaws. And in the past, I would have been like, oh, we have to work on these. And now I've said, you know what? Like, don't try to teach a fish to climb a tree. You know, like, if you're a fish, like swim better. You know, don't be like, oh, I can't climb

a tree. It's like, don't keep swimming, right? Just keep swimming. Yeah. And so, She's got the best advice, Dory. Dory, yeah, that's right. Keep swimming. But it's just like figure out who you are. Yeah, and lean into it. I mean, people talk about this in athletics, how like once upon a time, maybe 50, 60 years ago, the idea of the ideal athlete was someone who was just balanced in every possible

way, not too tall, not too short, not too strong, not too weak, you know. And now they realize that, like, no, like, you actually want the genetic. freaks, you know, because that's where you get the alpha, you know, you're someone who's like, if your wingspan is like, Michael Phelps with like massive wingspan. Yeah, do totally. Michael Phelps is like what, six four, six five, I think. He's huge, yeah. And there's a, and there's a, and there's like this, this marathon runner who I think is like five seven. And I remember reading an article that talked about how they wear the same pants. Oh, like, because, because the marathon runner is all legs and Michael Phelps is all torso.

Yeah. And you're like, yeah, you know, like you don't get good at a sport by being balanced and everything. You find the thing where you have the edge and you lean into that, you know? Yeah. One thing you mentioned was this. It seems like you got some history in enterprise sales, enterprise database. You mentioned PLG, partly growth.

Help me understand some of your backstory when it comes to. I guess just databases in general. How did you get into that world? What was that world for you? And how has it changed to now? Yeah, I mean, I've been using databases since the late 90s, I guess, ever since I started getting into computer science. I started using probably MySQL in 2004,

Postgres in 2011, I think, thanks to Heroku. So I've always been involved in databases. I think what's interesting to me is when I, when we started this company, which was then timescale, we entered a world that was where the success stories were companies like Horton works in Cloudera, really big on-prem. And that was not my background at all. I'd never, never been a salesperson, never worked with enterprise salespeople, you know, now I can, now I know what these terms mean, but back then capacity planning, quota coverage, territories,

they meant nothing to me. And we slowly had to learn it. But also, like, I also had this inkling that I'm like, hey, you know what? I feel like the database industry is changing. It's changing from that old model to like something looks more like SaaS. And SaaS is less about enterprise sales, more about building a great product. And I knew how to do that. And so I think like that was part of the journey.

It was like starting off as a user, getting into an industry, not really realizing how how the business worked. But then, again, I think following my instinct to be like, hey, I think this industry is shifting. One thing I like to say about myself and my co-founder is that we're very good students of the game. And so we were new to open source licensing and then quickly became open source licensing experts.

I would say we were new to PLG and sales, but I think now we're, I'm not sure for experts, but I think we're probably, you know, top core tile or whatever for that. You know, I think about the way, databases have changed and the way the sales of them have changed. Like, largely, it's as if you're not an open source database, you know, you're, you're not worth your weight in gold because it's a black box. Things can change. Even if, even the term, you know, and you may, this may

cut deep to you, potentially is Postgres compatible. I think time scale has, has been, has never been Postgres compatible. It's always been Postgres native. That's right. But somehow, out there choose that postgres compatible and that's because they want to do business differently they want to license differently and i think the plg model has obviously one i feel as a developer if i can't go and play with your tool even not so much in a free capacity but the ability to explore it and learn it and then trust it that's the way that's the way of the developer you got a side project you got an inch you want to scratch you want to try this different thing and if you're not going that route it's kind of hard

to really instantiate change in your organization. You may go from one database to another or you have an idea. And if you can't go and explore it and carve it off yourself and present it to your team, that's the way of PLG. That's the way of open source. Yeah, no, it's fascinating because I think databases like software used to be something where the key decision maker was the CIO or CTO and that deal was done in a steakhouse or on a golf course.

That's how it used to be, right? And with a shift to SaaS and then to shift to cloud for databases, that decision moved to like, no, it's a developer sitting at their computer just making the choice based on some combination of what they read, what their peers told them, and what their own visceral experience was. And I think that's been fascinating for me because... I mean, I think it's totally changed. I mean, in some, like the core job, the database done that does has not changed.

But I think the way you build, build the business has totally changed from being more sales led to being more product led. I think that's been interesting. Yeah. What was the original challenge you faced to even consider creating timescale? Like, what was that moment? When was that moment? We started off as a company building an IoT platform, Internet of Things. and it's like 2015.

Yeah, I mean, like back then, like I just spent 10 years in mobile. Like, you know, and I remember thinking, wow, like mobile was really exciting, but around 2014 started to get a little bit like boring. Like, you know, pre and post iPhone was exciting, but then 2014, you're like, okay, I have enough apps. I'm like, what's the next thing? And IOT felt like the next wave of computing. And so we started off building what we thought the market needed, which was a data platform for IoT devices.

And that idea was moderately successful. We tracked over 100,000 devices. We raised a seat around, built a small team. But we needed a database to store all this data. And, you know, we were using a timesur's database. We were using a relational database. And I remember at one point, we wanted to, like, I think, sort the console by, like, uptime, but then show all the device metadata.

And what should have been a simple SQL join? End up being like a two-week engineering sprint because you have to connect these two to silo systems. And I remember thinking, oh, this, this is awful. This sucks. And one of our engineers said, hey, I could build this on Postgres, but it'll take me a month. And I was like, okay, cool, you're an optimistic engineer, so it'll probably take you three months.

And, you know, 12 months later, we had this database. And I'm trying to sell this IOT platform. And look, you know, as an entrepreneur, you learn to listen to signals of and someone is really engaged. And when someone's like, oh, yeah, that's cool, that's not cool. But when someone's like, wait, wait, wait, hold on, can you tell me that again? You're like, oh, okay, there's something that's interesting to you. And so here I am trying to sell this IoT platform meeting with the German head architect

of this large shipping logistics company. I'm meeting them in Mountain View. And I'm telling me this IOT platform. And he's like, look, there's so many IoT platforms out there. What makes you're different? And I was like, oh, we built their own database. It does SQL, scales for time series. And then he was like, wait, wait, hold on.

Can you tell me more about that database? And I think that's when I realize, like, wait, this is solving a, this is actually solving the right problem. And that's how it became a database company. So yeah, long story short, we kind of scratched our own niche and realized other people have the same itch. But, you know, again, like we are students. We are, we listen really well to the market.

We try not to be dogmatic. And when someone says that thing's not interesting, but this thing is, we're like, hey, we're not here just to build that thing. We're here to solve a problem. This solves a bigger problem. Let's explore that. Well, friends, I'm here with my good friend, Chris Kelly, over at Augment Code. Chris, I'm a fan. I use Augie on the daily.

It's one of my. my daily drivers. Now I use Claude Code. I use Augment, Augie. And I also use Amp Code and others, but Augie, I keep going back to it. And here's where I'm at. I feel like not enough of our audience knows about Augment code, not enough about Augie, the CLI. It's amazing. I love it. What can you share? Yeah, we often say Augment is the best coding assistant you've never heard of. And that's both frustrating as to someone that works there and it's like very proud of the work we've done. but also like inspiring like we want to go and and sort of punch above our weight because like we aren't anthropic and we aren't open AI. And so the quality of the product itself, you know, with our

context engine, once you do touch it, people are like just blown away by that. And so like that keeps me going every day. So not to bear the lead here, but this is a paid spot. You are sponsoring this show to get this awareness. Now at the same time, we're selective and I love to use your tool. But there is in the world. So a lot of developers look at the space. and they say, okay, well, how long can this work? How long is this sustainable in the case of Cursor or a windsurf? Or you pick the name and you think discounted tokens, help me shape a lens for our audience. I think it's a lot of awareness, right?

Like Cursor got a lot of publicity early on for like fast revenue growth, which well deserved. I think, you know, frankly, some of the media got the, gets the story wrong in that like, if I gave you a $1.50 for every dollar you sent me, I'd be the fastest growing startup in the valley. And so when you're selling discounted tokens, yes, of course you're going to grow very fast, but all that money plus more goes to the model providers. So I think the real story is the story of Anthropic and, you know, being an API provider, I think the market has just moved so fast and there's so many pieces of competition out there that it's just hard to get noticed. So friends, I love augment code and I love using Augie. And I highly recommend

you use it. I love using Augie. I can hand Augie a well-defined specification, a well-defined PEP, as I call them in my world, an agent flow, and it executes flawlessly. So the cool thing about Augie that I love most really is that context engine, and I can hand it a task, and it can just churn away on my well-defined plan and just never bother me and accomplish the mission. It is so cool leveraging the latest models, the context engine, and all the fun things behind the scenes in that awesome CLI. So yes, go try it out, augmentcode.com. Right in the top there is a CLI icon, a terminal icon.

Click that, install it, and change your world. It's going to be awesome. Obamincode.com. Today you're not called timescale, though. That's right. And so there's a name change of recent, which I think is challenging, but it kind of maybe shows the evolution. What's the evolution of, you know, that discovery, that 12-month discovery, scratch your own itch,

IOT company to timescale to now be Tiger Data. We started off thinking we were building a time series database for IoT. That's where we started. And so when we kind of pivoted to become a database company early 2017, we called ourselves Time Scale. That seemed like a good name for Time Series database. I like it. That's cool, right?

It's pretty self-explanatory. And we actually saw there was a big, demand and time series, that was more than IoT, some in finance and events, and then soon crypto and some other areas. But over time, again, we're going with this journey with the industry. We started off as an enterprise sales motion. At the beginning of the pandemic, we went all in on cloud, stopped selling on-prem and said, hey, we're going to be a cloud company. And yeah, at that point, we were running databases for customers. And we got to see a lot of data. And I saw, wow, there are a lot of companies who are like 20 people

spending 50, 100, 150K with us. And I remember asking like, hey, what are you doing? Like, you know, what do you use this for? And I remember one of them was like, hey, I think of you as a better Postgres. I don't think of you as just a Times Series database. I think of you as my main, you are our main database. You are 50% of our Cloud spend. You are our main database because you are a better Postgres. And then we realized what we had built was not just a better timesurred database, but a better Postgres. And we kind of expanded to a better Postgres theme

by adding vector support and better native AI support. And we got to the point where this year we realized, hey, we keep calling ourselves timescale and people view us as a time series database,

but we had already become something more than that. It's as if like Amazon.com has started off as books.com. You know? And you're like, hey, books. com, we also sell CD.

people would be like, yeah, but you're a books.com. Hey, we also sell like socks. Yeah, but your books.com, right? And that's what time scale was. Time scale was like, yeah, yeah, you do AI, but AI with time series, right? And we're like, well, no, like AI, you know. And I think, you know, our first attempt was try to make timescale mean more than time series. Like, you know, when it's time to scale.

Like, I don't know. And I'm not sure you've ever seen the movie. movie Mean Girls, but there's a line in there that Mike has quoted where he goes, it's like trying to make fetch happen. Like, it's not going to happen. Like, we're trying to make this term stick, which wasn't sticking. And so we're like, hey, you know what? We didn't need a new name because we're Amazon. We're not at Books.com. And, but we're not pivoting. We're actually changing the name to properly reflect who we'd already become. Yeah. And Tiger Data was like the perfect name for us because we

our mascot's always been to tiger internally we talk about tiger time that's our all hands we talk about state of the tiger monthly this is my monthly presentation to the company new people who join the company are Tiger Cubs and yeah like we've internal tiger mascot

and so the name Tiger just worked because it was who we already identified with and to our existing customers it looked like yeah like it's your It's the same logo. Well, I get it. And some new people were a little confused, but we were like, you know what?

Like in 12 months, you will not be confused. And this is a right thing to do. So that's why he made that change. Was it scary to get to the point where you're like, you know what? The only way forward is a name change. Nothing else, just the name. It's, you know, it got to the point, which probably means we'd waited too long. It got to the point where it was painfully obvious to us.

yeah and and I remember and I told the team look this is not going to solve any problems but it is going to remove an anchor that is holding us back like it's still on us to kind of move the ship you know yeah but like it removes an anchor I think the key thing is you just have to stick to the decision and be like yeah it's going to be messy it's going to be maybe a year of people being like who are you again you know and we're like yeah we're tiger data You know, I actually think the name is catching on faster than I expected. I think the name changed awareness as smooth as we could have hoped. And I think people, time scale DB, I think still has more brand awareness.

But I think Tiger Data is catching up. Yeah. Some people made fun of us, but like, whatever. Well, haters hate, right? Haters hate, dude. Yeah. Haters do hate. So, you know, our audience knows this.

You've been a sponsor for a bit too. And, you know, I mentioned maybe in the pre-call, maybe in the early part of it, Isabelle is someone who works for you. And we've known each other for years since the MongoDB days. And we would have conversations, and this is when you were timescale. And this is what I do whenever I sit down with a brand and I think about how can we help them reach our audience in a way that is informative, educational, and just something that helps them be curious and try it.

if it's something that fits in their world, essentially. And, you know, I always do this version of an investigation to some degree. Like, look at your homepage, look at your products. What are you doing? And like, things just didn't, didn't pair up, especially like when you mentioned with, yeah, like, yeah, it's time series, but it's also just postgres. And it was hard for me because I was, I would tell this about like, hey, I would writer. You got to change that, that headline on your homepage. It just doesn't, just doesn't work.

Like, I, yeah. You're something that's not fitting here. And so when I saw the name change, you know, reflecting on your, your, your, uh, your mention of it seemed natural, essentially. When I saw the new name, the first thing I did was email his bill. And I was like, listen, that's an awesome name. We got to talk. When are you, when can you make time kind of thing?

Because I've been a few months since I talked to her. And that's what happens when you do a rebrand and change your name. You, you rethink your model, rethink your brand and you come back out with a new plan. And that's what I saw. And so the moment, just to kind of reiterate, the moment I saw this new brand tiger data, I was like, mm-hmm, that makes total sense. The tiger's there, the logo's awesome. It makes sense. I'm glad you felt that way because I feel like people who knew the company mostly felt that way, which was like, we didn't even change our logo. Our logo stayed the same. We just changed the name. And people were like, yeah, no, they get it. And by the way,

Tigers are cool. Tigers are cool. Tigers are cool. Right? They're cool. They're cool. What I like to, when you did this was the logo animated from timescale to tiger data.

Logos stayed the same, right? The mark that you have. I thought it was a nice little subtle touch. I was on marketing team. Yeah. I also, you know,

I'm not a, I think a lot of people like dark mode. And I think your previous set was all dark mode. And you may even offer a, dark mode version of your site. I don't know because I see the stark white version of it. It doesn't bother me. Like the yellow and the white and the black.

I just, it's, uh, whoever was in charge of that process did a great job. Thinking through the core of who you are and how do you come back at the side, not being completely different, but being different at the same time. Yeah. I know I, uh, that was a team effort,

but marketing team drove, drove that, uh, kudos to them. But I think it definitely gives you some thought on like, hey, does the name really matter? And I think where I'm landing right now is that the name may not help you, but it can hurt you. I mean, there are two schools of thought. One school of thought is you name yourself, books.com.

The school thought I named yourself Amazon, which could sell books, right? And I like the clarity of timescale because it was like, hey, time series. But, you know, in hindsight, it was limiting. Like, tiger, dude, tiger could be anything. Tigers are cool. Tigers are cool. So one of the things that you have now, I think, is this burgeoning idea of agents in our databases.

Yes. Right. And, you know, I think I'm at this point where there was this, this arc of acceptance, I would describe it, of, hey, come on now. AI hype, I'm over it, too much, this and that. And I think the game changed when Claude changed the game. That's where I really think it happened. I had been a user of chat GPT like many people.

I'd been the API to do something in chat, GPT and copy it out somewhere else, whether it was written material, whether it was an idea, whether it was a framework in terms of a thought framework, or maybe even a bash script because AI is pretty good at bash scripting. And then you kind of get to this other side where you're like, you know what? Wow, Agenic is is really revolutionary. And I think Cloud could really change that game from the new browser or the new destination point for developers. It is still in the IDE, right?

And that's still taking place today. But I think you're seeing this shift to the CLI that is just truly revolutionary that now the terminal. It was never not cool, but it's cool again, right? A lot of folks are hanging out there, cloud code kind of put that on the map in a way. And then a lot of folks decided to follow that direction. And I imagine that's kind of what you thought, too, is like, I'm, I'm probably doing a, you're probably doing a lot of agentic coding. You're probably playing with side projects. You're getting curious again.

And you're like, well, the next best thing is to, how can I just talk to my database? I can just put an agent in my Postgres. Talk about that. Yeah, I think, yes. I had a very similar experience with CloudCode. I remember one of my friends talking about agentic workloads in 2023. And I remember thinking, like, what are you talking about?

What is it? Agentic? What does that mean? And now I use the word agentic at least five times a day. Yeah. And CloudCode was that moment. CloudCode. I mean, Chad Jibati was cool.

But it was like a party trick. You know, it was kind of cool. It could edit for me. For developers, it was a party trick. I mean, for everyone else, it's pretty thing powerful. But as a developer and chat chit, it's not the right interface. Claude, yes, but not in the web browser. I remember building, because I was trying to talk to a friend.

I was showing it to a friend. He was like, oh, can we build like an app that tracks pushups? And I'm like, I don't know. Let's try it. And like, I think 45 minutes later, we like chat chip, we cloud had gone out and found the right like computer vision library. and other stuff and like I had like a mobile web app

that would use computer vision to detect if you're doing a push-up or not and it didn't get it always right but it got it at maybe 80% of the time which was pretty good for 45 minutes of work and I remember thinking like dude I can build anything like I can build anything now

and I'm with you with like I think Claude Cod code it felt like, wow, this is actually an agent doing work for me, writing code, making decisions, I can steer it, making me more productive. I remember going to a social event that night, and I couldn't even talk to people because I was so excited. Like, I went home early. I was like, I need to go back to Cloud Code.

I'm not doing, well, y'all. I got to go. Well, I'm trying to talk to people about Cloud Code, and they're like, what, are you okay? I'm like, no, this thing is amazing. You have to try it. What kind of point was it? Was it nerds or was it normal people?

it was partners part of normal people okay but even the nerds but even the nerds were like I mean cloud code had just come out like I think it was there was still like yeah I use

Claude I'm like no not Claude Claude you know like Yeah you know no I mean like you know I told you about that experience in identity 6 using the internet for the first time I got that's what this felt like like number one it felt like

I don't know what this is but I want to be a part of this. Like, this is fun, right? But also, it brought me, and I know a lot of my peers I feel this way, it kind of brought out this, like, child, childish sense of wonder that I think, like, years of being of an entrepreneur had kind of beaten down.

And it kind of brought it back to the service to be like, this is fun. This is fun the way technology should be fun, where you're just like, I just want to tinker with this. I don't know what I can build. I just want to build things. Explore this new world together.

And yeah, so I'm really excited. I mean, I think as a company, we're excited because we see this trend that like, like, you know, 80% of Claude code is written by Claude. The majority of new software of the next 12 months will be written by AI. We already have customers who tell us that 70% of their code is written by agents. And you look at this and you say, okay, if that's happening, then what else is happening? Well, that means the surface. area of software development needs to evolve for agents, right? The surface area of databases.

So now databases are serving a new user. They're not serving a human. They're not serving a human using an agent. So then you ask yourself, okay, then how does a database need to evolve for that? Well, number one, well, it's less of a GUI. So you remember, like, databases went from on-prem to SaaS, like cloud. But now you're going from SaaS to, I don't know, MCP, CLY. It's like the interface is totally different.

It's no longer like clicking, right? It's more like commands. And there's some other things too. Like you want databases to boot instantly. You want to be able to fork and create sandboxes quickly in a safe way. It costs effective way. You probably want native search, native memory. Yeah.

I mean, so I don't know. I'm just excited as like the little kid in me who just loves building things. You're excited. But also as a company, it's like, yeah, this feels like a problem someone should solve. And the answer is probably Postgres. and we might as well solve it. This lyric lands for me in this moment. It's from, I had to look it up.

I don't know this by memory, but it's from Marvin Gay and Tammy Terrell. Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby. So when you're in chat, GPT, and you're just ideating the future of what your software thing could be, if that's where you're kind of hanging out at. Versus that experience of in Cloud Code doing the same thing, but it's making the thing, right?

It's making the real thing, and you're seeing the real thing change. And maybe it's, maybe you're doing get commits. Maybe you're doing spec driven or document driven development and you're thinking a ton and you're writing it down or it's writing it for you or it's writing the markdown. But the ideas and the vision and the direction is coming from your lived experience and your wisdom and places you've been and valleys and called us actually you've been down. You're like, not going there. and they may try to take you there which is like no no no hang on let's let's curb that back

let's go here but you're seeing the real thing be made that to me was the was I think the moment where I was like that's that's pretty wild the real and and and you can be like okay cool commit those changes and push them upstream yeah you know and so you're like oh it's actually fitting because like when I use replet or lovable I'm they're fine but I was like okay cool but I don't I don't build this way. Maybe other people do. I don't. But now I'm like, yeah, I build this way. Like, yeah, commit the changes pushed upstream. Like, yeah, cool, great. Show me the diff. All right. You know, like the speed you can move at, I think is is kind of wild. You know, I laugh about this.

And I don't know how often you laugh about this. But I love when it makes a plan, it's like, well, this is week one, this is week two and this is week three. Meanwhile, four hours later, the thing's done, you know, or an hour later, whatever the number is. That is always funny. Yeah. And I like how it manifests its time ranges but I'm like it's kind of funny you know it's still making a plan or it's making a plan with you and the range of its time frame is is maybe it's actually accurate to how it should be if it was done with a team of humans versus a team of one with an agent and an idea and I think that's kind of wild is just the or maybe it's just under promising and over delivering because that's what even psychology something's going on there even

Even your mention of, you know, we had a conversation, you and I a few weeks back, and you mentioned the same thing. You mentioned this childlike play. And that's kind of the definition of flow, like flow state is, is that when you're in that state of flow, that state of play, a lot can happen there. You stay more engaged. It's kind of, it's kind of addicting in a way. I'm a big fan of that idea, the concept of play. When something feels like play, that's when you know you're like you're, like, you're, in it like you're in the flow you are doing the thing you should be doing yeah and um if i ever

write a book i think the title will probably be play because i feel like like like that i think that should be the driver it's like look for things that feel like play because because then those are things that really like kind of fit who you are and if you find something that feels like play and also lets you kind of support yourself or your family. Yeah, dude, that's the jackpot, right? Yeah. But the AI story kind of reminded me of something. When the personal computer

came out in the late 70s, people struggled how to describe it, probably similar to how we struggled describing chat GPT and Claude today. And Steve Jobs, who was probably the best, one of the best tech marketers of all time,

either he came up with this or Apple came up with this, but they would talk about how a computer is like a bicycle for your mind which is like a kind of a weird like today that feels like a weird analogy but like I get it right because back then you're like hey this thing this is like pre-spreadsheet

right hey this thing like we don't know what the key use cases are but kind of like how a bicycle lets you get from point into point be faster like this is just making you better and that's how I feel about cloud code And there's all this discussion about like, hey, our agent's going to replace us. I mean, maybe some of the things we do.

But for most of the things, I think it'll be like a bicycle. It'll just help us get from point A to point B faster. Yeah, I don't know. I think that's part of the joy is being like, hey, this thing that used to take me a week or I couldn't even do before now and get done in an afternoon, totally throw it away and start again like the next day. Try to juxtapose the time frame of IoT company using Postgres. Needing time series, engineer developer, employee, whatever, comes to you and says,

I could do this in Postgres, I could do it in a month, you're like, yeah, you're ambitious, you can do it in three months, 12 months later, that whole story, juxtapose that time to idea, to CLI, and we haven't even talked about the CLI yet, but getting to this point of agentic postgres and building what it is, like how did you, How fast did you go from idea to using the thing? I mean, a lot faster. I think a day. I don't even know, man.

I mean, I think this is the theme in the AI land is like just ship. Just ship? Just ship, right? We're a database company. So we have a slightly higher bar than maybe a classic app, but like I just ship. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely a shift between it used to be hard to build. But now it's a much easier to build, which probably means that the more of the, the bottleneck then becomes a distribution and awareness, which is like, I think something similar to what, you know, the iPhone is the bottleneck though, distribution awareness.

It's just, it's just exacerbated now. Yeah, but I remember once upon a time pre-AWS, I mean, you probably remember this too, which is like to start a company, you needed to like, you need a server rack, you need maybe a couple of sun micro system machines. an Oracle 8-Ey database, and just to get started with such a high bar that a lot of people couldn't do it. I was actually to say, I think it's similar to what the smartphone did to photography, right? Like, once upon a time, being a photographer was really hard, even if you look at before digital cameras, right? And you'd only take so many shots. You'd have to develop it. It would take time. It's hard to get right. You know, you would have to actually apply physical filters and physical lenses to change the thing.

And with the smartphone, everyone became a photographer. And what that meant was that like in the past, having great photos would set you apart. But now it's like anyone can create a great photo, but how many followers do you have on Instagram? You know? So kind of again shifted the burden from photography skill to like distribution. And I feel like we're going to go through something similar with software. How much do you know about the, I suppose, the details of the CLI and the MCP server that is in your product? Because I felt pretty, when I look behind the scenes of the open source of that, you know, it's elegant the way you've married a CLI and an MCP server in a single binary.

That's right. That's pretty wild. I think the design is, I had to borrow it, honestly. That's good. I got a couple things I'm working on that are. One is a DNS Resolver, and I want to, like, talk to the Resolver. And so the obvious answer is to have an API, right? But then you also have to have a CLI that talks to that API.

But then I'm like, well, I'm actually using an agent. So I'm taking a playbook from Aj and Tiger Data and Agentic Postgres. and, well, the same CLI can offer an MCP server running at the same time, and you can talk to it and get back JSON for the agent or get back CLI response for the human. Like, the design there was so elegant. I want to know what you know about that design. I know the team that built it is really smart.

You know, I think they looked at a couple different options. I think the way it works right now is that the CLI will run a local MCP server, which then speaks to a remote one that we have. And the remote one is where we index, you know, our MCP will allow you to do things with Postgres and Tiger, but also lets you, you know, search the Postgres documentation, download best practices. And so we put that on its own kind of remote MCP server. I think MCP in general is, it's such an interesting area. And I feel like a lot of people hate on it because, you know, it seems so simplistic.

But I think just the idea that, you know, people talk about in the physical world, like the idea of a design affordance, you know, this concept? It's this idea that like when you see something, like when you see this mug and you see this thing, you know, you can hold this. Right. Right. You know, it's kind of like, you know, a door handle. You're like, I know I can turn this. There's one reason why Tesla door handles trips some people off because they don't see the handle. What's going on here?

Yeah. Actually, I think that's bad design. But in affordance is when the tool teaches you how to use it, because it's designed the right way. Like games, like Mario. The Super Mario Brothers, the first game was like that was why it was. That's right. Level one was level one. It was teaching how to play level two and three and four.

And so this is where MCP, to me, is not just an API. It's essentially a way to expose tools. for agents to essentially think about like, hey, we used to make these handles for human hands, but now we're going to make them for agent hands. And that is a really growing art. Anthropic who developed MCP, they're still learning best practices.

I think that's really interesting. You know, it's to figure out what proper tool design looks like. How many tools is too many. You know, I think right now tools are mainly a wrapper around API. but I think it'd be cool if they were actually doing the job, you know, not just the API.

Yeah, so I think the team's done some good stuff. There's some really other some good stuff that we're going to release soon. Yeah. But I think MCP, I think MCP design, I think this idea of designing for a new user, the agent is, I think, a really fascinating area. So our friends at Framer are fans of this podcast and their sponsor.

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And I've done a couple toy CLAs just to play with them. One for proxmok, so I'm a home labber. I don't know what kind of nerd you are, but I love to have. home lab and one of the epicenters of my home lab is some version of a raspberry pie somewhere or an intel knuck or maybe a slightly bigger one which is a nas which is usually true nass and the next best big thing in the network for me at least is a proxmox machine which is dedicated where i can do different things whether it's a service or tink with something or play with a new version of of Linux, you know, or just distro hop or distro play, however you want to describe it.

But as I'm, as I've explored this world a bit and I've understood what it's like is I'd never really built many CILIs before. And, and I was like, well, the, the next thing you want to do there is really just, you want to enable now that we have agent decoding. And it's, it's almost ubiquitous. So when you build a tool or you build a new CELA, You think about a new way to create an API with a CLI that lets you talk to a service. It's, it's, you can assume or presume pretty, pretty good with pretty decent accuracy that the person may be using an agent, likely using an agent, or at least has one nearby and is, you know, working towards being okay with that.

Some people are still not okay with that. So I was like, you know, the, it only makes sense now that. when you design these tools, you can't just designed the old way, which was, well, I'm designing this obviously to solve a human problem. So it's going to be a human using it. Now we have humans that are still there. There's still the human in the loop or on the loop depending upon the framework. But that human is leveraging one or many agents or subagents to automate and to do different things in their tasks,

whether it's designing the plan, whether it's writing all the code and they're reading the code. They're still doing the code review. Maybe they're doing 20% of the coding because the agent does 80% of it or 90% of it or whatever the number is. You know, likely this person has an agent. And so we now have to look at the way we build tooling in a way that's like, okay, I used to do it this way, human only. But now the human has a friend, an agent. I can design for both of them because that human is expecting their agent. to have agency on their behalf as they command it to do the task.

100%. And the agent speaks a different lane, which reads a different way and interacts with a command line or an API in a different way. And that's where MCP or even like cloud plugins come into play have, how do you feel about that world? How do you feel about like agents in our Postgres? And now we can actually talk to our database. I think, I mean, agents will be in everything.

because I think it is it is someone helping you use the thing that you're using and I mean you may not have an agent like inside the database itself but you probably have an agent inside the system that's running the database

that's one thing we're exploring right now with on Tiger Cloud is having agents that help you no but it is totally right like I think again it's not replacing the human it is the human doing the thing they need to do, but now they're doing it through an agent.

And so now you're saying, okay, like, the job to be done is still the same, but the thing, doing the job is different. And so it's going to need different things than what the human needed. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think, like, some places we're looking at is like, you know, what are some of the menial tasks in a database that you don't really want to do, right? Okay, cool.

Like maybe you start there, right? But also, what are some tasks that you can't do? You know, maybe an agent can because agents aren't limited by time and space. You know, they can easily paralyze and run things and shut them down. When I look at what you've done with, you know, agentic Postgres, which I think it's, I'm not sure if you're trying to brand that term. I think it is the first time I've heard it. I wonder if that would just become the thing. And it's a product named like X-Rox or Clean That.

And I won't be using Tiger Data's agent to Postgres. I'll be using somebody else's because there are more Postgres database providers out there. Yeah, I wonder if that's the case. But when I look under the covers of this thing and what you've done, it's the first time I can look at something and say, now I can actually talk to the database. Now I can actually sort of command it to go do something and it goes and does it. It could even be a branch or a fork or whatever terminology you're using.

to say give me a safe area to play in that's just never this has never been a thing before you know and now now it kind of is yeah I mean this the CLI I mean I think CLEs have been useful for they've been a thing for a long time right what 15 years maybe yeah I mean I don't know if you look at Unix maybe it's forever you know they're on the way back I feel like CIL is like the next frontier in a way really I feel like the next year so we're going to have this massive swath and maybe some will live and some will die but that's going to be the delivery mechanism. So, yeah.

I think the key thing is that the CLI is a clear program that agents can use. So, okay, so when we built a Tiger CLI, like it's written and Go, it's distributed as a single binary. It essentially provides a unified control plane for your database on Tiger Cloud. And so, you know, covers, you know, off obviously creating, starting, stopping, forking databases, connecting databases. But, but like, what's really, I think, nice about it, can you like, you point? it out is that it has MCP baked in so you know you can run essentially a local MCP server through

the CLI that you're then your cloud code or whatever can talk to and now um and now your agent has access to all these basic commands you know it has access to like starting stopping forking databases connecting the databases we've also uh it also proxies another MCP server that we host where we have indexed the Postgres and timescale and Tiger documentation. And now we provide semantic search and tech search on there. So it's again, it's not just a CLI. It's not just CLI-PC server. It's CLI-PC server that actually makes your agent smarter.

I don't know. Like I would say, I'm not sure of this is true, but it probably is. This is probably the first AI-Native CLI for Postgres. Like, it's not just like, I think other Postgres CLIs are just like API wrappers, but this is really thinking about bringing the CLI commands into the agent, but then also giving agents the Postgres context and needs, best practices, documentation, so that it's instantly like an expert developer. Yeah. You know, I mean, I know a lot of developers hang out on the command line, but I feel like, To some services, the CLI was not so much an afterthought. It was sort of you have to do it, but not a lot of people would use it as the kind of primary interface.

And now that we have agents in the command line, I feel like it's table stakes. If your service doesn't have a fleshed out, thought through, well-defined API so that you can also have a thought-out, well-defined CLI. And then, you know, maybe MCP lives and maybe it, maybe it dies because agents can just sort of map around. I know Claude has plugins and things like that so you can sort of use Markdown to teach it of all things, not TypeScript, not go, not Russ, but Markdown, like words. Maybe MCP, there's talk about, you know, is it a fad, is it not? I'm still not sure because how sure can you be when things change on the weekly? even on the daily, but just this idea that now the new frontier for a service is a cloud, is an API, and is a CLI at its best. And maybe MCP lives or dies, but for sure you got some sort of plug-in system that you can teach with a slash command in the CLI that most people are using if it's open code, if it's cloud code, if it's Augie, if it's AMP, like you pick your agent, that's right, you know, or codex even.

they're always last on my list for some reason but you know the moment you give them that slash command now the agent has access to the CLI if it's got great help doc so dash dash help on all your commands now the new frontier is like this really well fleshed out CLI I feel like that's that's where so much attention is going to be going if not already there no it's a great point and I think and again like hey is

Is MCP going to be the end all protocol? Yeah, I don't know. But there will be a protocol. And I think that's the point, right? It's when you're making a point I'm trying to make. And why do you need this protocol? Well, number one, you need a way for the agents to interact with your APIs. But number two, you probably want to give them access without giving them the full keys to the kingdom.

Right? You want to give your agent just enough power, but maybe sandbox in a certain way. Maybe, you know, they can do some things, but not others. And I think this is where MCP, your agentic APIs, really play a role. And then the CLI is another way to do that. CLI is another way to give essentially a tool to the agent that is properly defined in what it can and can't do. Yeah, no, I think it's really interesting. I think the team's done some really cool.

I think this docs thing, and I'm not sure if I'm beating a dead horse here, but I think what they did with the docs, I thought, was especially clever. I haven't seen anyone else do. It's like, hey, we have an MCP server where we have indexed the Postgres documentation and the Tiger documentation. And we've indexed it for text search and semantic search so that your agent can effectively get a PhD in Postgres. You know, like we've done the test. You can create schemas without our MCP and then with our MCP and then have Claude compare the results. And with the MCP, it's just a much better schema, you know, it's, I think that's been really cool. And I think that is, I think it's almost a variant of the skills that you see in Claude.

But I think that's another element of agents that I think is under explored is the fact that with the right markdown, they can become experts in anything. Did you see the talk from Barry Zang and I think his name is Mahesh, Marag? they're both from Anthropic it's the first time I've seen well I guess the first time I thought I would see anybody talk on stage for an hour about Markdown they introduced I think I saw the tweet about it

it was like a packed room or something yeah like yeah like an hour long talk about using Markdown you just wouldn't expect that right that's not the language that's not the language I thought would be front and center now I love

I personally prefer Markdown. I've been a obsidian user for years now. And so I'm all about flat files, no, nothing that's sort of obfuscating my pros from my source and Markdown is that. But it's the first time I thought I'd ever see somebody on stage presenting a revolutionary new feature that is now used by so many folks now. I'm starting to use plugins. It's Markdown.

It is wild. In fact, I have a friend working on a markdown editor for vibe coding, you know, not for note taking, right, but for like vibe coding. No, you know, it's a new world, man. You know, maybe we'll find that's a weird thing with these agents is that in some ways they are very similar to us, you know, you don't teach it using machine code. you teach it using text in marked words words words words words man words yeah you know it is it is wild i do feel that well i also think when it when your discussion earlier i had a thought that

like about the terminal about how yeah like more people are are using the terminal limiting the terminal there's probably a business idea out there if no i'm sure someone's working on it of building the modern terminal. I think, well, my favorite, and I'll give them a nod, because they are my favorite, is Warp. I think they've been, gosh, I recall talking to them almost five years ago, and it was the future of the terminal, I want to say. The Terminal of the Future, I believe was the title we shipped on that.

And Zach Lloyd is, I think he's a solo founder, even of Warp. And Warp is my daily driver. So that's what I use when I'm in a terminal, I'm using Warp. Now I know Mitchell Hashimoto and Ghostie is awesome. I love it. I'm so thankful for what they're doing, especially what Mitchell did with the foundation kind of piece to it to kind of give ghosty a home forever. Yeah.

But something about Warp just gets me. And so I just like Warp. So I think they may be ahead of the puck in terms of that. Yeah. Well, it sounds like Warp. Did Warp start before this whole AI thing? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

They were, it's probably two years before, I want to say, at least two to three years before GPT3 may people think that emails will forever be written by machines. And right, nah, I don't ever happen. You know what I mean? And now, right? You know, can you summarize this into an email form for me? I will edit it and I will remove what I don't like or whatever. That's, that's, it's not how I write all my emails by any means. a few that require attention or care or particulars, why would I write all that out?

You know, I can have, I can have the thought and the thought process with the agent. And then it formulates all the thoughts that are just given it into a cohesive form. And I can move along to my podcast with a J, you know, which is actually what I did. I was, I sent an email just before our call. And my agent helped me write it. And I'm cool with that. I read it. I know what the words were in it because they were all part of a 20 minute back and forth about this or that.

And I'm like, hey, can you package this entire sequence up into an email? And it did. And I cut out most of it and edited it to be Adam. That's cool. You can even teach your agents to think like you think, you know, to like especially in cloud with these plugins and stuff like that. and the way you can, you know, change the prompt behavior to make it more antagonistic to your ideas and not be like a yes agent, yes, a J, that was the most brilliant idea ever. Let's do this. No, no, no, push back, you know, so you could do a lot of that with, with these things.

And it's just, it's a, it's a bicycle for your mind. And now we have with a mind. Yeah. And now we have it for our database. I think that's such a wild thing, man. But what's on the horizon for you? Like, I know that we can't uncover things that are maybe releasing soon or not actually to spill the beans. But what's over the horizon?

A little bit that's coming up soon. Did you release T's? What is that for you? Yeah. For Tiger Data, whatever. Well, so we started off as time scale building a database that scaled postcards for time series workloads. And then it became a postcard that scaled for workloads in general, especially analytical workloads.

What we got into the genetic Postgres is now serving not just the scale use case, but the start use case. It's like, hey, when I am building a new application with my agent, give me a database that just works. And what you'll see coming forward

is just us continue to innovate on those two dimensions, start and scale. Like on start, we're still making our MCP even better and CLI even better and cares what you think when these changes come out. We've actually been toying on a a side project that is

a separate MCP server that is a little bit more than the database and this is actually being developed by, I remember that engineer who said he would take a month and it took him 12 months? It's the same guy doing this one. But he's moving a lot faster. And, you know, I think

we launched a new storage layer called fluid storage to enable kind of ephemeral forks. You'll see more stuff around that. Fast forking, safe forking, sandboxes, more around search, and more at scale. Yeah, and I think, I think, you know, again, like the job we do is, hey, when you're a developer and you're looking for a database, we give you the database that just works. And it's built on Postgres, you know, you can trust it.

But just works means something different at start than it does at scale. At start, it means, hey, it just works with my agent, makes things easy. At scale, it means, yeah, it's all. so reliable and cost effective and fast. Yeah, we're like 170 people and we're pushing on on all those directions. It's a lot of people. I didn't expect that number. I should ask that sooner, but yeah, that's a lot of folks.

Wow. That's a lot of folks behind you. Pretty wild. Well, Jay, it's been a pleasure diving into where you've been and why you've built what you built and how you built what you built. It's been fun. Thank you. Thank you, Adam. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. Good to see you. Well, friends, there is something that stuck with me from this episode with a Jay. He said build skills, not agents. And I keep coming back to that. You know, we're in this moment where everyone's racing to build something big. The next unlock

in the workflow. The agent that does it all maybe. You know, skills are composable. Skills are teachable. Skills compound over time. And when you build a skill, you're not trying to replace someone. and you're trying to empower them. That is a fundamentally different posture towards AI. And that's the thread running through my brain right now. That's the thread that I think Tiger Data is pulling on from time series to talking to your database, giving agentic access, letting you the developer be in charge.

Talking to your database is kind of revolutionary. And on top of that, the terminal is evolving. The database is evolving. The way we ship software and build software is evolving. But the best tools have always done, the same thing. They meet you where you are and they take you somewhere new. So a big thank you to our friends who have sponsored to this podcast and of course our friends over at Fly. That is the home of changelaw.com and maybe you can be your home too. Learn more at fly.io. And of course to the beat

freak in residence break master cylinder bringing those banging beats and we love them. Hope you love them too. Well friends this is one of the last episodes of this year. It's been an honor to host these podcast for you. I hope you've enjoyed listening to them. Hang with us in Zulip. You can go to changelaw.com slash community. Hang your hat, call it your home. Everyone is welcome. No impostors at all whatsoever. You are welcome. Again, changelaw.com slash community. And it's free. That's it. This show's done. We'll see you in 2026. Bye friends. Game on.