How and where will agents ship software?

Summary

We’re entering a new phase of software engineering. People are becoming addicted to agents. Beginners are vibe-coding apps and experts are maxing out their LLM subscriptions. This means that a lot more people are going to make a lot more apps, and for that we’re going to need new tools. Today we’re releasing an API that gives you and your agents full-stack backends. Each backend comes with a database, a sync engine, auth tools, file storage, and presence. Agents can use these tools to ship high-level code that’s easier for them to write and for humans to review. It’s all hosted on multi-tenant infrastructure, so you can spin up millions of databases in milliseconds. We have a demo at the end of this essay. Let us explain exactly why we built this. We think that humans and agents can make the most progress when they have (1) built-in abstractions that (2) can be hosted efficiently and (3) expose data. Built-in Abstractions To build an app you write two kinds of code. The business logic that solves your specific problem, and the generic stuff that most apps have to take care of: authenticating users, making queries, running permissions, uploading files, and executing transactions. These are simultaneously critical to get right, full of edge cases, and also not the differentiating factor for your app — unless they’re broken. If all this work isn’t differentiating, why build it? When a good abstraction exists, it’s a waste of tokens to build it again. And agents need good abstractions even more than human programmers do. Locality To make agents work well we need to manage their context windows. It’s very easy to break through limits. Especially when agents write code that involves multiple moving pieces. Consider what happens when an agent adds a feature to a traditional client-server app. They change (a) the frontend (b) the backend and (c) the database. In order to safely make these changes, they have to remember more of the codebase and be exact about how things work...