The Hidden Layer Every AI Agent Runs On | Tony Holdstock-Brown, Inngest

Tony Holdstock-Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Inngest, the durable execution platform that quietly powers your favorite AI agents.

We get into why agents work in a demo and die in production, building their own cloud to get 20x lower cost, growing 35x after AWS and Cloudflare copied them, growing a dev tools company without a personal brand or Twitter account, why he thinks evals today are like “asking the criminal if they committed the crime”, and the thing they built to score 100% of your production agents without paying for LLM as a judge.

Thank you to Numeral, Flex, Amplitude, Merge, and Monaco for supporting this episode.

Numeral: Sales tax on autopilot numeral.com
Flex: Premium banking, 60-day credit, 0% APR home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital
Amplitude: AI analytics amplitude.com
Merge: Every model, one API merge.dev/turner
Monaco: The revenue engine for startups monaco.com

Timestamps:
(0:00) The hidden infra layer every AI agent runs on
(1:46) Building complex chains of logic
(3:31) Why agent SDK's don't go far enough
(4:49) Healthcare was the original event-driven nightmare
(6:32) Storing traces on your infrastructure enables self-improving loops
(14:26) Why Inngest was already in the right place for AI
(15:49) Score agents off product events, not LLM's
(17:31) The OpenAI copy-paste signal
(21:24) Swap in LLMs and cut costs 20x
(23:44) How customers pulled the product forward
(25:41) Orchestration belongs outside the sandbox
(29:48) Building a neocloud to cut costs 20x
(32:09) Most neoclouds just resell AWS
(32:54) All AI infrastructure is converging
(34:49) Why Claude can't just build your backend
(36:44) How to build a software factory
(39:12) Agents are a lottery you get addicted to
(42:44) Loops must exist until AGI hits
(45:38) If models keep getting better, why orchestrate?
(48:28) When incumbents steal your features
(52:30) Why you can't vibe code infrastructure
(55:54) Why Tony has no personal brand
(59:38) Dev tools GTM without Twitter
(1:03:20) Lessons from the founder of DuckDuckGo
(1:10:39) Truth as a company value
(1:13:08) Taking too long adapting to AI
(1:15:10) Startups are 100% R&D
(1:17:19) Ali from Databricks
(1:19:03) Writing his own code, Voice-to-text with local models
(1:23:53) Evals are batshit insane

Referenced
Inngest: inngest.com
Principles by Ray Dalio: amazon.com/dp/1501124021?lv=shuf&channelId…
Traction - How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth: amazon.com/dp/1591848369?lv=shuf&channelId…

Follow Tony
Twitter: x.com/itstonyhb
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tonyhb

Follow Turner
Twitter: twitter.com/TurnerNovak
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

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