A company discussed on AI Engineer.

GTM Is You - Victoria Melnikova, Evil Martians
Jul 7, 2026 · 12:35
Victoria Melnikova argues that a founder's personal brand is the most underrated competitive advantage for developer tool startups in 2026, citing interviews with Sam Lambert (Planet Scale), Zeno Rocha, and David Cramer. She presents the Product-Market Fit Compass, a framework from Evil Martians that analyzed 37 successful DevTools, finding that 9 out of 10 times product signal is stronger than revenue, making distribution the bottleneck. Key tactics include moving to San Francisco for network effects, using banners and billboards to signal credibility (as TypeCents did with hundreds of billboards), hosting events like Supabase's user conference, and embracing failures (Zeno Rocha walked away from 300k ARR to start over). Melnikova emphasizes being unapologetically yourself, as AI can amplify but not replace unique personal brands, and notes that founder-led sales builds trust in early-stage startups.

Combine Skills and MCP to Close the Context Gap — Pedro Rodrigues, Supabase
May 15, 2026 · 18:27
Pedro Rodrigues from Supabase argues that combining agent skills with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) outperforms either alone, closing the context gap that makes agents unreliable on production systems. In a test with Claude Sonnet 4.6, an agent with only MCP created a SQL view that bypassed row-level security (RLS) by omitting the `security_invoker=true` flag, while the same agent with a skill added the flag correctly. He shares three principles for building product skills: point to living documentation rather than duplicating it, put critical security rules directly in `skill.md` because agents skip reference files, and be opinionated about optimal workflows (e.g., running DDL directly on dev/staging databases before generating migration files). Their evals across Claude Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, GPT 5.4, and GPT 5.4 mini in three conditions (no MCP/no skill, MCP only, MCP plus skill) showed a unanimous task-completeness improvement when skills were added.

Skill Issue: How We Used AI to Make Agents Actually Good at Supabase — Pedro Rodrigues, Supabase
May 4, 2026 · 1:18:41
Pedro Rodrigues, AI tooling engineer at Supabase, demonstrates how to write, test, and iterate on Agent Skills to make agents actually good at real systems like Supabase's performance-review app. He explains progressive disclosure—skills load only a short description first, letting the agent decide when to pull in full instructions—and shows that combining skills with MCP tools gives agents both context and actions. In a live demo, Rodrigues reveals a common failure: creating a database view without a security invoker flag bypasses row-level security, letting all users see everyone's salary data. Adding a skill with security checklists guides the agent to include the flag, fixing the bug. He then introduces an eval-driven development cycle using an eval.json file and an LLM-as-judge to automate testing across conditions with and without the skill, cautioning that writing accurate evals is tricky because non-deterministic outputs can mislead. The session offers a practical framework for validating skills, avoiding pitfalls, and measuring what actually improves agent behavior.

Building durable Agents with Workflow DevKit & AI SDK - Peter Wielander, Vercel
Jan 6, 2026 · 1:09:49
Peter Wielander from Vercel introduces the Workflow DevKit, an open-source library that adds durability, observability, and resumability to AI agents by wrapping them in a workflow pattern. He demonstrates converting a coding agent into a workflow-supported agent, showing how steps like LLM calls and tool executions become isolated, retryable units. The toolkit enables long-running agents that can sleep for days, resume streams after disconnection, and integrate human-in-the-loop via webhooks. Deployable on Vercel or any cloud, it provides built-in observability through a local UI. The Workflow DevKit is currently in beta with general availability targeted for January.

AX is the only Experience that Matters - Ivan Burazin, Daytona
Jul 24, 2025 · 15:25
Ivan Burazin, co-founder of Daytona, argues that agent experience (AX) is the only experience that matters, as AI agents will soon outnumber human developers and tools must be built for agents to autonomously operate. He cites that 25% of YC startups say AI writes 95% of their code and 37% of the latest YC batch build agents as products. Burazin outlines three AX pillars—seamless authentication, agent-readable docs (like Stripe's .md and LLMs.txt), and API-first design—then introduces Daytona's agent-native runtime, which spins up sandboxes in 27 milliseconds and includes features like a declarative image builder, network-mounted volumes for large datasets, and parallel execution for agents to fork environments. He concludes that any tool requiring a human in the loop is built for the past, and if agents cannot use a product, no one will.

Supabase Vector: The Postgres Vector database: Paul Copplestone
Nov 3, 2023 · 16:05
Paul Copplestone, CEO of Supabase, makes the case for pgvector as an embedded vector database within Postgres, arguing it offers production-grade performance and unique advantages for AI applications. He recounts how pgvector was contributed by a single developer, Andrew Kane, and how Supabase integrated it, leading to 12,000 new databases launched weekly with 10-15% using pgvector. Addressing benchmarks that claimed pgvector was 20x slower, Copplestone shows that adding HNSW indexing brought accuracy to 0.99, matching specialized vector databases, and a cost comparison vs. Pinecone ($410 vs. $480 for comparable queries/sec) demonstrates Postgres competitiveness. He demonstrates Postgres's extensibility with a cat image filtering example using partitions and triggers to separate good cats (similarity >0.8) from bad, all in 14 lines of SQL. Finally, he outlines future work on sharding with Citus to handle billions of vectors, and invites design partners for enterprise use cases.

Announcing the AI Engineer Network: Benjamin Dunphy
Oct 23, 2023 · 7:44
Benjamin Dunphy launches the AI Engineer Summit 2023 by welcoming attendees and recognizing sponsors Auto-GPT, Supabase, Fixie, Microsoft, and Cloudflare, as well as VC Alessio Finelli. He then unveils two major updates for the conference's mobile app, Network: AI-Enhanced Matching, a generative algorithm using LLMs to connect attendees based on stated problems, and the open-sourcing of both the event app and matching algorithm on GitHub, enabling any event to use them. Dunphy credits lead engineer Simon Sturmer for the mobile app, 'Sweezett's teller' for the matching algorithm, and infrastructure partners Dscope (auth) and Supabase (database and PG vector). The announcements aim to improve high-signal networking among the 500 selected engineers, founders, and sponsors at the summit.
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