What Happens When Everyone Can Build Software
Garry Tan and the Lightcone hosts talk with Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone about how AI agents and non-engineer builders are driving huge database growth, and why he thinks everyone will become a builder.
The gist
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Copplestone says Supabase has 13 million sign-ups, up from about 3 million a year ago, and creates over a million databases a week.
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Supabase moved from an Airtable-style dashboard on Postgres to an API to code-first tools, and rewrote error messages to tell agents how to fix problems.
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Tan built GBrain, his retrieval system for OpenClaw, on Supabase Postgres, and runs Cappy agents that loop on evals daily to improve its scores.
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Copplestone builds by talking to Dots on phone calls and never looking at the code, so he can test Supabase the way non-engineers will.
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His advice is to pick durable categories like databases, which he says have lasted 50 years, adapt fastest, dogfood, and leave spare team capacity.
Garry Tan uses it
"And then Supabase was just very straightforward. It's like, I need hosted Postgres and I need it to be able to support a 50 or 100 gig or 300 GB database corpus really fast, and it's been great. The auto scaling works really, really well."
▶ Play at 35:069 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Liam Ottley, and Benjamin Chen.
See all on the Supabase page"Let's build a UI that looks like Airtable on top of Postgres. Because I actually loved Airtable as well. I was like, wouldn't it be cool if that was just a Postgres database on the back end?"
▶ Play at 20:423 creators recommend it, including Bradley Clark and Liam Ottley.
See all on the Airtable page"Kudos to Heroku. I think they popularized Postgres. But at the time, Postgres was still pretty nascent and it still had some scaling limitations. And so, yeah, we've had to wrap Postgres in some tooling that will allow it to scale indefinitely."
▶ Play at 24:224 creators recommend it, including Cody Schneider, Kevin Rose, and Pete Koomen.
See all on the PostgreSQL page
Garry Tan uses it
"And then when I saw OpenClaw, it was just a very different way for you to work with AI, because then it's like, oh, the AI's smart. It's not trying to hurt you, and you should just let it do stuff, and you should just give it data and capabilities."
▶ Play at 33:0830 creators recommend it, including Claire Vo, This Week in Startups, and Jesse Genet.
See all on the OpenClaw page
Garry Tan uses it
"I use Cappy. Cappy has this concept of captains... you can just give it a context, and so I have one that is always going that's like, come up with new categories, and I have another captain that's always going through all the categories in evals and auto research and every si..."
▶ Play at 37:49"So, like the way I've been building is I'm using Dots. I just sit on a phone call with it all the time and I'm chatting to it and saying, 'Oh, can you make these changes?' ... It's doing some phenomenal stuff that feels like something out of a sci-fi movie."
▶ Play at 27:5910 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Alexander Bericos, and Claire Vo.
See all on the Dots pageWhat they recommend · 7 picks
AI tools
4 picks · Paul Copplestone and Garry Tan
"So, like the way I've been building is I'm using Dots. I just sit on a phone call with it all the time and I'm chatting to it and saying, 'Oh, can you make these changes?' ... I..."
"And then when I saw OpenClaw, it was just a very different way for you to work with AI, because then it's like, oh, the AI's smart. It's not trying to hurt you, and you should j..."
"I use Cappy. Cappy has this concept of captains... you can just give it a context, and so I have one that is always going that's like, come up with new categories, and I have an..."
Y, Garry, Riley and Greg agree on 22 things
See what they all use, in their own words. Paid ads are left out.
See what they all swear by Or pick your own peopleSoftware & apps
2 picks · Garry Tan and Paul Copplestone
"And then Supabase was just very straightforward. It's like, I need hosted Postgres and I need it to be able to support a 50 or 100 gig or 300 GB database corpus really fast, and..."
"Kudos to Heroku. I think they popularized Postgres. But at the time, Postgres was still pretty nascent and it still had some scaling limitations. And so, yeah, we've had to wrap..."
Other picks
1 pick · Paul Copplestone
"Let's build a UI that looks like Airtable on top of Postgres. Because I actually loved Airtable as well. I was like, wouldn't it be cool if that was just a Postgres database on ..."
Garry Tan
4 picks · guest
"And then Supabase was just very straightforward. It's like, I need hosted Postgres and I need it to be able to support a 50 or 100 gig or 300 GB database corpus really fast, and..."
"And then when I saw OpenClaw, it was just a very different way for you to work with AI, because then it's like, oh, the AI's smart. It's not trying to hurt you, and you should j..."
"I use Cappy. Cappy has this concept of captains... you can just give it a context, and so I have one that is always going that's like, come up with new categories, and I have an..."
Paul Copplestone
3 picks · guest
"So, like the way I've been building is I'm using Dots. I just sit on a phone call with it all the time and I'm chatting to it and saying, 'Oh, can you make these changes?' ... I..."
"Let's build a UI that looks like Airtable on top of Postgres. Because I actually loved Airtable as well. I was like, wouldn't it be cool if that was just a Postgres database on ..."
"Kudos to Heroku. I think they popularized Postgres. But at the time, Postgres was still pretty nascent and it still had some scaling limitations. And so, yeah, we've had to wrap..."
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