How and where will agents ship software? (instantdb.com)

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

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.

If we achieve super intelligence, agents will be shipping themselves.

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.

Just dont connect an agent to a pay per query database, unless you want to risk getting large bills.

Make sure the agent knows how much it costs to query

> Traditionally, end-users were non-technical and would be stuck with whatever the application developer gave them. But now every user has an LLM too.

Interesting point.

I keep coming back to the idea that users could request changes, and they could be experimentally deployed immediately.

What other MCP-compatible tools are people using to ship/deploy software? Is there anything AWS-compatible that people like/use? Something for self-hosters? Anyone letting their agents ssh into machines..?

I suppose that most deployment/devops is done using existing git push workflows and IaaC. Has anyone had good experience with LLM/agent-compatible tools?

I built an app (HN Clone, of course) with Instant's MCP hooked up to Claude Code.

The experience was brilliant.

Pros:

+ Fast

+ Easy

+ "Vibe coding on steroids" basically

+ The sense of 'wow' that comes very rarely with new tech

Cons:

- It used Instant as the database/backend, but I wasn't sure what it had done / how exactly it worked and had to spend a bunch of time asking Claude + reading the code to get it. It seemed reasonable, but if I were doing a prod system vs a PoC, this is where the time would be spent. ("Vibe coding lets you create tech debt 10x faster")

Net-net: This is the way for prototyping / validating. This is probably the way for production systems in N months too once the toolchain + agents get better.

I've been using InstantDB for two projects for one year and it's awesome.

Love Instant. Great team and product. Congrats on the launch!

Fun software but the only issue with Instant is their pricing. Once they gain adoption, I expect them to significantly raise their rates, I can seen them charging over $1 per GB easily. And like with any vendor lock-in, you’re stuck paying whatever they decide to charge. Observe with caution I'd say

The most frustrating problem I have had with Firebase Studio is Gemini 2.5 attempting to create firebase rules... it was completely unworkable in my experience - just constant permissions errors. I pivoted to Claude Code a few weeks ago with Prisma ORM and NEON db running on Netlify. It's been pretty good so far. I will give InstantDB a go soon I think.

Please don’t use a vibe-coded app for anything important.

I use Claude. I like Claude. But I’ve backed away from having Claude actually write my code other than in the most limited circumstances.

I caught it copying one of my TS Interfaces, for example. And modifying, then using, the copy. So my type-checks pass, yay! But wait what?

It wrote a test for a tricky bit of code. The test wouldn’t pass. So it re-wrote it in a way that couldn’t possibly fail, mocking all elements inside the test itself.

I’m not anti-AI. But I wouldn’t trust anything vibe-coded above the importance of, say, Wordle.

This is a massive business opportunity for whoever owns the market.

I have a friend who owns a small/medium sized marketing firm. They typically manage social media and advertising for local businesses (butchers, plumbers, NPOs, etc.). A major cost center for them is dev. They can generally handle developing assets (images, videos, text copy) and publishing them (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram) but if they need any kind of interactivity (even basic forms or CRM-like stuff) they used to hire programmers.

This friend is now "vibe coding" the simple interactivity that previously they had to outsource. In the last few months he has pitched, won and crucially delivered simple apps for a few clients. We're not talking complex web apps, it's mostly CRUD forms and basic workflows, the kind you see people go on about using n8n on Twitter. He's talking to me these days about React, Tailwind, DNS and all of that stuff.

His clients don't know, or care, how he delivers. The local butcher doesn't know about "best practices" or whatever. He just cares that if someone signs up for his newsletter that he gets a notification and that person gets his weekly meat deals email.

His firm is picking up more and more complex projects like these and saving a huge amount on costs. Turn-key services that enable guys like him are going to reap the rewards.

> 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.

this is a hosted lamp stack, we had it 20 years ago. is cpanel is not fashionable anymore?

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