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 https://www.numeral.com

Flex: Premium banking, 60-day credit, 0% APR https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapital

Amplitude: AI analytics https://www.amplitude.com

Merge: Every model, one API https://www.merge.dev/turner

Monaco: The revenue engine for startups https://www.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: https://www.inngest.com/

Principles by Ray Dalio: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501124021?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Traction - How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591848369?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

Follow Tony

Twitter: https://x.com/itstonyhb

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonyhb/

Follow Turner

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

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