Building Agentic Applications w/ Heroku Managed Inference and Agents — Julián Duque & Anush Dsouza
Jun 27, 2025 · 52:35
In this workshop, Heroku Principal Developer Advocate Julián Duque and Product Manager Anush Dsouza introduce Heroku Managed Inference and Agents, a platform designed to make every software engineer an AI engineer by simplifying the attachment of agents and AI to applications. They demonstrate an opinionated, curated set of models (e.g., Claude 4) and an agentic control loop running on Heroku's trusted compute (Dynos) that provides first-party tools like code execution (Python, Node, Go, Ruby), Postgres schema inspection and querying, and document conversion, all streaming responses in real time. The workshop walks through provisioning inference via a single CLI command or add-on, using a Jupyter notebook to chain multiple tools (e.g., HTML-to-markdown then Python execution), and attaching custom MCP servers (like Brave Search) that spin up one-off Dynos and scale to zero. They also show how to expose MCPs remotely via a server-sent events endpoint for use with Cursor or other clients, emphasizing security (read-only database followers, bearer tokens) and future OAuth support. The episode concludes with a call to try the platform via a free trial team valid through the weekend.