Prisma Podcast

Tyler Hogarth

Conversations with the people building the future of software, hosted by Tyler Hogarth, Head of Engineering at Prisma. We sit down with builders, founders, and technical leaders from inside and outside Prisma to talk about the technology actually shaping how we ship software: AI, infrastructure, developer tooling, databases, and the messy engineering decisions behind them. Some guests are building the tools you use every day. Others are wrestling with the same problems you are: scaling systems, adopting AI without the hype, making infrastructure boring in the best way. The through-line is honest, technical conversation. No sales pitch, no buzzword bingo. Just people who build things talking about how and why. Prisma is a TypeScript, AI-native infrastructure platform and the creator of the most popular TypeScript ORM in the world, used by millions of developers. That gives us a front-row seat to how modern applications get built, and this podcast is where we open that conversation up to everyone. If you're a builder or a technical leader who wants to understand where technology is heading, from the engineers living it, subscribe and join us.

Episodes

  1. Sep 9

    AI Builders Weekly: 07 Sep 2026

    Tyler Hogarth, Søren Bramer Schmidt and Tyler Benfield work through a week of model launches: Astra, Fable 5.1 with its Mythos update, another Gemini Flash, and a cyber model from nearly everyone. The first thing the panel noticed was not capability, it was spend. Søren used a full week's quota in half an hour, because the new models spawn subagents at their own tier instead of dropping down for simpler work. That leads to the more useful question: which tasks actually need frontier intelligence, and which ones have been solved for months. Google gets a hard look. The retreat from the frontier race makes sense to everyone; the lack of movement on the products does not. From there it's open weight models running real production workloads, the gap between subscription and API pricing, and why getting agents off your laptop is still harder than it should be. — What we discussed 1. Quota disappears because every subagent runs at the parent's tier, with no downgrade for scoped work that a cheaper model would finish. 2. Google is selling compute to rivals rather than feeding its own models, while the Gemini app remains one of the weaker agents on a phone Google ships itself. 3. GLM and Kimi handle the background work: code review, incident response, ClickHouse reporting. Three months behind the frontier is enough when the task has clear success criteria. 4. A $200 subscription is a 10 to 15x discount on tokens, so open weight models only win on cost when your workload forces you onto the API. 5. Remote agent setups still break. Zed sessions die with the laptop, mobile dispatch drops connections, and the alternative is a stack simple enough to rebuild on any fresh instance. — Hosted by Prisma x.com/prisma prisma.io — Where to find us Tyler Hogarth x.com/tylerhogarth linkedin.com/in/tylerhogarth Søren Bramer Schmidt x.com/sorenbs linkedin.com/in/sorenbs/ Tyler Benfield x.com/rtbenfield linkedin.com/in/tylerbenfield — In this episode (00:00) A week of new models, and everyone's cyber model (00:54) A week's quota in half an hour (01:44) Subagents that never downgrade (02:37) What we learnt building our own multi-agent harness (03:27) Google steps out of the frontier race (04:35) Gemini, the garden bug specialist (05:33) Why Workspace still has no agent worth using (06:30) TPUs, and selling compute to your competitors (07:36) Blessed connector lists versus dropping in an MCP URL (10:01) Are the open weight Chinese models still worth it? (12:16) Where GLM is already overkill (13:34) Cheap models and weaker local currencies (14:27) Subscriptions versus API rates (16:07) Getting agents off your machine (17:29) Devin, and the hosted environments catching up (19:25) Bare metal VMs and a laptop that stops burning (20:50) SSH, dying Zed sessions, and Herdr (23:08) Simplify the stack instead: Bun and Postgres (24:47) Hosted VMs from the model providers (26:20) The multiplayer agent thread (27:57) The multi-provider outage on 3 September (29:17) Nvidia acquires Hugging Face — References Zed - zed.dev Herdr - herdr.dev Bun - bun.com Devin - devin.ai OpenRouter - openrouter.ai Hugging Face - huggingface.co Model Context Protocol - modelcontextprotocol.io Hetzner - hetzner.com Vultr - vultr.com

  2. Aug 28

    AI Builders Weekly: 25 Aug 2026

    Tyler Hogarth, Søren Bramer Schmidt and Tyler Benfield talk about what agents are doing to source control and to the way teams build. They start with GitHub's monthly commits doubling to 2.9 billion, and why Cursor's Origin and Zed's DeltaDB matter more than the outage that came with them. The conversation turns to the prompt being the human input that Git has nowhere to store. It ends on why the processes we built for lazy, clever humans do not suit eager, less clever agents. — What we discussed 1. GitHub's monthly commits went from 1.4 billion in April to 2.9 billion, and source control needs reinventing rather than more capacity. 2. The human input is the prompt now, not the code, and Git has nowhere to put it. That gap is what Zed's DeltaDB goes after. 3. A written value hierarchy beats a cast of role-playing agents. Tyler Benfield's runs isolation safety, correctness, performance, operability, readability. 4. An agent is defined by the context you take away, not the experience it built up. Handoffs between agents are mostly unnecessary, with the adversarial review agent as the exception. 5. Verification is what overloads your laptop, not the agent. Test suites, type checks and browser runs are the work worth moving off-machine. — Hosted by Prisma x.com/prisma prisma.io — Where to find us Tyler Hogarth x.com/tylerhogarth linkedin.com/in/tylerhogarth Søren Bramer Schmidt x.com/sorenbs linkedin.com/in/sorenbs/ Tyler Benfield x.com/rtbenfield linkedin.com/in/tylerbenfield — In this episode (00:00) Intro (00:14) GitHub commits double in four months (02:25) Why GitHub's competitors never broke through (04:23) What Cursor's Origin is betting on (06:04) Zed's DeltaDB and prompt-aware history (07:07) The prompt is the human input now (09:25) Access control for agents in source control (10:45) How much babysitting agents still need (13:48) Recovering from an incident at 4am (15:32) On-call escalation, but for models (15:51) Daily agents reporting on ClickHouse and traces (17:14) Self-healing telemetry and agent-raised PRs (19:50) QA moving ahead of peer review (21:46) Do we need 17 agents with human names? (23:30) Replacing the product, delivery and engineering triad (25:09) The case for letting agents debate (27:38) A value hierarchy for critical code (31:15) What actually makes one agent different (33:51) Why the review agent is the exception (36:18) Software factories that improve themselves (37:56) Verification, not the agent, melts your laptop (41:47) What people are still best at — References Cursor Origin - cursor.com/origin Zed DeltaDB - zed.dev/blog/introducing-deltadb The August 17 outage, and the work ahead - github.blog/news-insights/company-news/the-august-17-outage-and-the-work-ahead/ Prisma Gremlin - prisma.io/blog/gremlin-turning-open-tasks-into-pull-requests ClickHouse - clickhouse.com Axiom - axiom.co Mastra - mastra.ai Playwright - playwrite.dev

  3. Aug 28

    Episode 4: Future of Building

    Tyler Hogarth sits down with Søren Bramer Schmidt and Shane Neubauer to ask who gets to build software once agents write the code. They open on whether a non-technical founder still needs a technical co-founder. That turns out to be the wrong question: domain knowledge is the scarce input now, not engineering. The conversation gets practical from there, on a database shut down for inactivity and logs deleted before anyone could read them. It closes on what a platform owes builders who are going to make mistakes. What we discussed 1. The group of people who can build software is about to grow many times over, and most of them come from product, design, marketing and other non-engineering backgrounds. 2. Getting from zero to one no longer needs a technical co-founder, though system design experience still catches an agent committing to a bad structure early. 3. Wiring up eight separate services takes longer than building the application, which makes integration the bottleneck rather than code. 4. Tools should assume people will hand their agent production access and make that safe, instead of mocking the users who do it. 5. A specialised harness can beat a smarter model, because a platform carrying its own current docs outperforms a better model guessing from stale training data. — Hosted by Prisma x.com/prisma prisma.io — Where to find us Tyler Hogarth x.com/tylerhogarth linkedin.com/in/tylerhogarth Søren Bramer Schmidt x.com/sorenbs linkedin.com/in/sorenbs/ Shane Neubauer x.com/sneub linkedin.com/in/shaneneubauer/ — In this episode (00:00) Intro (01:49) Who gets to build software next (03:37) Do you still need a technical co-founder? (04:11) Two paths for engineers (10:24) How the cost of starting up changed (13:32) Could a taxi veteran build Uber alone? (15:44) A non-technical builder and a Rocket League database (17:43) Signing up to eight platforms to ship one app (21:52) Where builders hit the wall after prototyping (24:15) Deleted databases and guardrails that assume mistakes (30:55) Specialised harnesses versus smarter models (39:53) Why the laptop is the wrong sandbox (43:28) What a team looks like in twelve months (49:02) Can an agent build the business too? (52:05) The problem no agent absorbed for us (54:25) What an agentic platform should cover (59:42) Free tiers and growing with the customer — References Prisma Postgres - prisma.io/docs/postgres Prisma Compute - prisma.io/compute Prisma Next - prisma.io/docs/next Prisma 8 - prisma.io/docs/orm/v8 Bun - bun.com Google AppSheet - about.appsheet.com/home/ WhatsApp's 50 engineers - wired.com/2015/09/whatsapp-serves-900-million-users-50-engineers/

About

Conversations with the people building the future of software, hosted by Tyler Hogarth, Head of Engineering at Prisma. We sit down with builders, founders, and technical leaders from inside and outside Prisma to talk about the technology actually shaping how we ship software: AI, infrastructure, developer tooling, databases, and the messy engineering decisions behind them. Some guests are building the tools you use every day. Others are wrestling with the same problems you are: scaling systems, adopting AI without the hype, making infrastructure boring in the best way. The through-line is honest, technical conversation. No sales pitch, no buzzword bingo. Just people who build things talking about how and why. Prisma is a TypeScript, AI-native infrastructure platform and the creator of the most popular TypeScript ORM in the world, used by millions of developers. That gives us a front-row seat to how modern applications get built, and this podcast is where we open that conversation up to everyone. If you're a builder or a technical leader who wants to understand where technology is heading, from the engineers living it, subscribe and join us.