A product discussed on Latent Space.

Devin’s 80% Moment: Background Agents, 7x PRs, & End of Hand-Held Coding — Walden Yan & Cole Murray
May 28, 2026 · 1:09:33
Walden Yan (Cognition CPO) and Cole Murray (creator of OpenInspect) argue that background agents are becoming critical infrastructure as Devin's merged PRs grew 7x and its share of commits jumped from 16% to 80%. They explain why architecture matters, particularly the decision to separate the agent's brain from the machine (harness out of the box) for security and permissions, and why full VMs beat Docker for running real applications. Testing, they stress, is a harder problem than computer use—requiring orchestration of services, feature flags, and multi-model coordination. Memory remains unsolved, with Devin using auto-generated 'Knowledge' and exploring file-system-like approaches. Both caution against uncontrolled vibe coding, which regresses codebases to the worst engineer's style, and advocate for hybrid frontier/sub-frontier systems to balance cost and capability.

AI Agents Need Computers: 74% MoM Growth, 850K/Day Runs, & New Agent Cloud — Ivan Burazin, Daytona
May 21, 2026 · 1:11:40
In this episode, Ivan Burazin, CEO of Daytona, explains why AI agents need composable computers rather than disposable code execution boxes, and how Daytona pivoted from human dev environments to building a bare-metal sandbox platform that spins up one sandbox in 60ms and 50,000 in 75 seconds. Daytona's biggest customer runs 850,000 sandboxes daily, and RL/eval workloads have surged from 0% to 50% of usage. The platform competes against managed Kubernetes (EKS/GKS) by offering stateful snapshots, dynamic resizing, and a scheduler purpose-built for agent workloads. Burazin also discusses the company's 74% month-over-month growth, the addition of Windows sandboxes, and the licensing challenges of macOS. He argues the future AI cloud will look more like Stripe than AWS, and that agents will need every kind of computer—including legacy Windows environments—to automate knowledge work.

The antidote to AI fatigue — Answer.ai Solveit
Oct 2, 2025 · 55:26
Jeremy Howard, Eric Ries, and Johno Whitaker join host Alessio to present Answer.ai's Solveit platform, arguing that human-in-the-loop, step-by-step AI collaboration outperforms fully autonomous agents for complex coding and writing tasks. The 12-person team built their own integrated development and deployment system, eschewing cloud vendors. Solveit provides each user a persistent Linux Docker container with a Jupyter-like interface where the AI can see all steps, enabling immediate error correction and iterative improvement. Johno demonstrates building a perfume scent search engine in under an hour; Eric shows how he uses Solveit to manage writing his book 'Incorruptible', incorporating test reader comments and fact-checking sections. Jeremy reveals they turned Andrej Karpathy's GPT tokenizer video into a polished blog post. The Solveit course launches October 20th at solve.it.com, teaching this philosophy beyond just the tool.

⚡️Launching Ona: Coding Agent with Fully Sandboxed Cloud Environment
Sep 1, 2025 · 33:44
Gitpod co-founders Johannes Landgraf and Chris Weichel launch Ona, a coding agent platform with fully sandboxed cloud environments, arguing that the future of development is parallel agent-driven work rather than mono-focused IDEs. They explain their rebrand from Gitpod to Ona, driven by their product outgrowing the technical name. Ona provides reproducible dev environments via dev containers and automations YAML, runs any Linux workload, and by default gives agents full autonomy (Yolo mode) since environments are ephemeral and risk-free. They dogfood heavily—75% of their PRs are co-authored by Ona. Key challenges include file edits (they settled on Anthropic's string replace tool) and underspecification by users. Pricing follows a credit model blending compute and token usage, with enterprise VPC deployment and $100 in credits for new self-serve users. They envision IDEs shifting to interfaces supporting parallel tracks, but currently offer one-click transitions to desktop editors like Cursor.

[AIEWF Preview] Containing Agent Chaos — Solomon Hykes
Jun 3, 2025 · 27:14
Solomon Hykes, creator of Docker and founder of Dagger, argues that the industry needs an open standard for AI coding agent environments to avoid repeating the fragmentation seen before Docker. Dagger, a workflow engine originally built for post-development automation (CI/CD), is now being pulled by its community into the agentic space to solve environment isolation, portability, and observability for concurrent agent teams. Hykes insists containers are the right base layer but require a new, agent-native UX—unlike legacy Dockerfile or Compose—that is decoupled from any IDE, model, or cloud provider. He critiques current vertical monoliths (e.g., proprietary IDE-hosted agent environments) and advocates for a Lego-like modular approach where the environment is the standard linchpin. Dagger integrates with existing stacks rather than replacing them, and Hykes previews fresh, unreleased content for his upcoming keynote at AI Engineer World's Fair.

What is an RL environment? w/ Nous Research's Roger Jin
Apr 29, 2025 · 15:27
Roger Jin of Nous Research explains why reinforcement learning (RL) environments are critical for training open-source language models, arguing that RL overcomes supervised learning's limitations—handling non-differentiable rewards, multi-step objectives, and negative feedback—while enabling models to surpass expert labelers. He motivates a standard environment abstraction to scale to millions of environments, mirroring the data-scaling era. Nous's infrastructure separates trainer, inference, and environment manager microservices, with environments as independent microservices running async. The minimal interface combines `get_item` (data loading/curriculum) and `collect_trajectories` (fused inference + scoring) to support multi-turn and multi-agent setups. Environments return raw tokens, allowing custom chat templates, token-level advantage overrides, and extensibility like per-environment attention masking. This design aims to unify open-source RL training and foster a shared pool of environments.

Building Manus AI (first ever Manus Meetup)
Mar 27, 2025 · 48:59
Tao Zhang, co-founder of Manus, explains how Manus gives LLMs 'hands' to take real-world actions, inspired by MIT's 'mens et manus' (mind and hand). Manus assigns each task its own cloud virtual machine via E2B, provides pre-paid data APIs (stock, social media), and a knowledge system to remember user preferences. Their previous product, Monica.im, grew to 20M monthly active users and $50M ARR before they pivoted from a failed AI browser project to Manus. On the GAIA benchmark, Manus achieves a per-task cost of ~$2, far cheaper than OpenAI's Deep Research (~$20) and prior SOTA. Zhang emphasizes a 'less structure, more intelligence' philosophy, opting not to predefine workflows but to give the model rich context and tools. He also discusses plans to partner with Cloudflare, pay paywalls on behalf of users, and integrate more APIs based on usage patterns, while ruling out building their own foundation model.

Browserbase: Browser Infrastructure For Your AI Agents
Feb 28, 2025 · 1:01:33
Paul Klein IV, CEO of Browserbase, argues that headless browser infrastructure is a critical primitive for AI agents to automate the web. Browserbase solves the hard problem of running thousands of browsers in the cloud—too big for Lambda, requiring Firecracker microVMs—and exposes APIs via its open-source framework Stagehand (act, extract, observe). It handles proxies, CAPTCHA solving, and offers a live view iframe for human-in-the-loop control. Primary use cases include browser automation and web scraping as a heavy-hitter renderer when simpler methods fail. Paul explains his choice to go solo founder and how Browserbase's in-person, 10–5 culture enables fast execution. He predicts the future of software will involve software acting on other software via browsers.

0 to over $8M ARR in 2 months as a Claude Wrapper (Bolt.new, Qodo)
Dec 2, 2024 · 1:36:42
Eric Simons of Bolt.new/Stackblitz and Itamar Friedman of Qodo discuss Bolt.new's viral growth from $4M ARR in four weeks to over $8M ARR in two months as a Claude wrapper, driven by its in-browser WebContainer OS that eliminates local dev setup. They contrast Bolt's '0 to 1' creation for non-developers with enterprise-focused agents like Qodo's testing and code review tools, arguing that specialized agents outperform general-purpose ones. Simons details how WebContainer's unified sandbox enables error self-healing loops, while Friedman explains AlphaCodium's task-breaking that boosted o1 preview to 93rd percentile on Codeforces. The episode covers open-source strategy, pricing tiers ($20 to $200/month), and founder advice on ignoring expert doubt to ship fast, illustrated by Simons' Ironman completion while launching Bolt.

The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Computer Use, and Building SOTA Agents — with Erik Schluntz, Anthropic
Nov 28, 2024 · 1:11:08
Anthropic's Erik Schluntz explains how Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieved state-of-the-art 49% on SWE-Bench Verified by using a minimal agent framework that gives the model full control via tools like bash and file editing, letting it self-correct without hard-coded workflows. He details the importance of tool design over prompt engineering, why XML tags work well, and how computer use reduces integration friction by letting models interact with any browser-based interface. Schluntz also shares his robotics experience, noting that while LLMs and diffusion models are promising for general-purpose robots, reliability at 99.9% and hardware variability remain major hurdles, and he expresses skepticism about self-driving as a business due to high vehicle costs versus driver-equivalent revenue.

A Brief History of the Open Source AI Hacker - with Ben Firshman of Replicate
Feb 28, 2024 · 1:21:09
Ben Firshman, CEO of Replicate, explains how the inference platform grew from a research reproducibility tool into a 2M-user API business by embracing the generative image community and treating open-source AI as a hacker-friendly ecosystem. They accidentally discovered their API when a user reverse-engineered their web form, leading to their first $1k/month customer. Cog, their container standard for ML models, was born from lessons at Docker and the need to make models tinkerable. Ben argues that fine-tuning's low cost makes open-source models sustainable, and that AI engineers (orders of magnitude more than ML engineers) just need to start playing with models. He also discusses GPU scarcity, preferring sustainable pricing over price wars, and reveals that demand is not outpacing supply thanks to aggregating demand.

Truly Serverless Infra for AI Engineers - with Erik Bernhardsson of Modal
Feb 19, 2024 · 1:08:58
Erik Bernhardsson, creator of Annoy and Luigi, founded Modal to build a 'postmodern data stack' with a self-revisioning runtime that eliminates container cold starts and lets developers attach GPUs with a Python decorator. His serverless platform can fan out to thousands of GPUs within seconds, becoming a natural fit for GenAI workloads like Stable Diffusion and fine-tuning (e.g., RAMP fine-tuning 100 models in parallel). Modal differentiates from Replicate by targeting custom models and workflows, and from Modular by offering a managed cloud service rather than licensed software. Erik argues that buying hardware is inefficient for startups and that infrastructure founders must be willing to spend years on load balancing, page faults, and DNS. He shares how his IOI Gold Medal background shapes Modal's talent culture, hiring competitive programmers for complex scheduling and bin-packing problems.
Powered by PodHood