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How and where will agents ship software?

instantdb.com

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How and where will agents ship software?

#1

Post by stopachka »

The linked article explains this in detail, but today we're releasing:

1. An API to spin up apps programmatically. This is great if you are building platforms, where you can spin up databases and backends with 0 additional compute

2. An MCP server, which lets you and your agents talk to Instant and create apps

3. Agent rules, which tell agents how to use Instant

If you want to try this yourself, we have a tutorial that lets you run Instant in your own workflow: https://www.instantdb.com/tutorial. Let us know what you think!

How and where will agents ship software?
instantdb.com

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#2

Post by simonw »

This article is about teaching coding agents to use InstantDB, which is "a modern Firebase".

I suggest jumping straight to this document, which is designed to tell the agent how to work with Instant but is pretty great documentation for humans who want to understand what it can do at the same time: https://www.instantdb.com/mcp-tutorial/claude-rules.md

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#3

Post by CartwheelLinux »

I'm saving all of these articles for the next time we go through the "AI (LLMs) is going to change the world," cycle.

The systems we use can only be as smart and intuitive as the people who prompt them.

On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#4

Post by lenerdenator »

CartwheelLinux wrote: post #3

I'm saving all of these articles for the next time we go through the "AI (LLMs) is going to change the world," cycle. The systems we use can only be as smart and intuitive as the people who prompt them. On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting.

> On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting.

puts in retainer; pushes glasses back up bridge of nose

Technically schpeaking, what you're talking about is the difference between weak AI and strong AI/artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is the kind of AI that has reached human levels of consciousness. We're not there yet. Personally, I hope we don't get there, but I'm not the one in charge, so shrug.

You can do a lot with glorified prediction systems that require human prompting. Actually, they are arguably more valuable than AGI because you can more easily communicate and utilize their value proposition. People don't need a machine that wonders the same stuff they do; they need something that does a specific task in lieu of their own effort.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#5

Post by CartwheelLinux »

lenerdenator wrote: post #4
CartwheelLinux wrote: post #3

I'm saving all of these articles for the next time we go through the "AI (LLMs) is going to change the world," cycle. The systems we use can only be as smart and intuitive as the people who prompt them. On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting.

> On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting. puts in retainer; pushes glasses back up bridge of nose Technically schpeaking, what you're talking about is the difference between weak AI and strong AI/artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is the kind of AI that has reached human levels of consciousness. We're not there yet. P…

Haha. You're 100% correct in the AGI/AI thing. I'm just sick and tired of every article being about AI, it's great people but we can't stop innovating and attending to other areas of technology.

>You can do a lot with glorified prediction systems that require human prompting >People don't need a machine that wonders the same stuff they do; they need something that does a specific task in lieu of their own effort.

This is the problem with our current revision with AI; the way I see it those two are in conflict with each other. In lieu of their own effort, the way a vast amount of the would be users think, is "without promoting" which would lend towards AGI than AI.

>Actually, they are arguably more valuable than AGI because you can more easily communicate and utilize their value proposition.

To you and I this might be true, but to your average non-techie I don't think it's quite as true as you would like it to be.

Short term it is very true, everyone sees the value until you realize it's inherit limitations and the 'shiny, wears off

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#6

Post by nezaj »

simonw wrote: post #2

This article is about teaching coding agents to use InstantDB, which is "a modern Firebase". I suggest jumping straight to this document, which is designed to tell the agent how to work with Instant but is pretty great documentation for humans who want to understand what it can do at the same time: https://www.instantdb.com/mcp-tutorial/claude-rules.md

Thank you for the kind words on the rules/documentation! It was definitely an iterative process to figure out how to get good results.

We have an llms.txt and llms-full.txt (~9k lines) which contains all our documentation. Feeding these to the claude didn't get great results, it was just too much information.

We manually compressed our llms-full.txt into a rules file (~1.5k lines) which declared the API upfront and provided snippets of how to do different things with callouts to common examples. This condensed version did better but would cause Claude to make subtle mistakes.

Looking at the kind of mistakes Claude made, it seemed like a human could make those mistakes too (very useful feedback for us to improve our API ). We thought “what's one of the smallest fully contained examples we can make that packs a bunch of info on how to use Instant?” That would probably be useful for both a human and an agent. And indeed it seemed to be the case.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#7

Post by xnx »

CartwheelLinux wrote: post #3

I'm saving all of these articles for the next time we go through the "AI (LLMs) is going to change the world," cycle. The systems we use can only be as smart and intuitive as the people who prompt them. On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting.

> On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close,

Do you think that the LLM/AI tools today are better than those from 2 years ago? Do you think the LLM/AI tools in 2 years time will be no better than the ones we have today?

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#8

Post by dmitrygr »

xnx wrote: post #7
CartwheelLinux wrote: post #3

I'm saving all of these articles for the next time we go through the "AI (LLMs) is going to change the world," cycle. The systems we use can only be as smart and intuitive as the people who prompt them. On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, if anything they are glorified prediction systems that require human prompting.

> On top of it, this (LLMs) is not AI, not even close, Do you think that the LLM/AI tools today are better than those from 2 years ago? Do you think the LLM/AI tools in 2 years time will be no better than the ones we have today?

False equivalency. Faster and faster stochastic parrots != intelligence.

Re: How and where will agents ship software?

#10

Post by physix »

Read the comments here so far and I find that they are absolutely right to offer an AI layer that speeds up building apps on their db.

Once built, the solution is plain-old-runnable-code (PORC :-), as long as the business logic implemented doesn't exit to LLM. So I don't fret so much about the AI hype story here.

For anyone starting off building with new tech, an AI assistant is really helpful.

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