The Agent-Native Cloud: Jake Cooper on Railway's Future

If you are writing code by hand, you are doing this wrong, right? Like your code, the tools are good enough at this point like that you can move extremely extremely quickly and like yes, there are issues and pain points and all these other things. Um, but you should be reviewing the code that you are writing instead of trying to go and write it by hand. Like all of those architectural patterns, all of those other things like you're not just don't like you're not going to throw them in the garbage or whatever. Actually, they matter more now than than than any other time. But you just shouldn't spend your time generating code that you would write. Like if you know how to go in and write it, just like ask the agent to go in and write it and then reconcile it until it looks like you would have written it. Before we get into today's episode, I just have a small message for listeners. Thank you. We would not be able to bring you the AI engineering, science, and entertainment content that you so clearly want if you didn't choose to also click in and tune into our content. We've been approached by sponsors on an almost daily basis. But fortunately, enough of you actually subscribe to us to keep all this sustainable without ads, and we want to keep it that way. But I just have one favor to ask all of you. The single most powerful, completely free thing you can do is to click that subscribe button. It's the only thing I'll ever ask of you. And it means absolutely everything to me and my team that works so hard to bring the Inspace to you each and every week. If you do it, I promise you we'll never stop working to make the show even better. Now, let's get into it. Hey everyone, welcome to the latest space podcast. This is Allesio, founder of Colonel Labs, and I'm joined by Swixs, editor of Len Space. Hey. Hey. And today we're in the studio with Jay Cooper of Railway, conductor of railway. Conductor at railway. Yeah. Choo choo. Have that like anywhere on like your Well, we like we roughly call like people in Well, I don't have a business card. Um we're not we're not that big yet. Um at some point I will. I got handed a nice business card from the super micro folks and I was like, damn, that's actually like this is pretty official. Um business cards. Yeah. Yeah, they're they're cool. Um they're hip. They're jiggy. Um but yeah, the the whole conductor thing, like we call some of our volunteer moderators conductors, you know. Yeah. So, it's a good one. It's a good one. Like, we're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. And there's like varying levels of um thought. Some people are like,"Oh, it's super cringe." Like, just don't like you don't need a name for like, you know, people internally and some people like,"Oh yeah, we want to call each other like this thing or whatever." I was like,"We still don't have a really good one." You know, we've got like we've got like new rail recruits, we've got like trineiacs, we've got like nothing's like really train. Um okay so well for those who don't know what is railway let's give people a crisp definition up front. Yeah, railway is the easiest way to ship anything. You just go to the canvas or you talk with claude um and you say deploy Postgress instance, deploy my GitHub repository, run this code, etc., right? Um and you'll just be up and away to the races, right? Um yeah, you have a nice animation on the landing page. Oh well, thank you. Um none of my work by the way. They don't let me touch any of the design stuff anymore. But yeah, we want to make it really easy for not just to like deploy things, but for you to almost like evolve applications over time. Like we believe that most of the tooling right now is kind of like stacked up like you're stacking entropy on top of entropy on top of entropy, right? So you have like Docker and Cube and then like Ansible scripts and all of these other things, right? Um, and if we can kind of like version all of your software for you and keep track of all of the changes, then we can make it actually trivial for you to clone environments, you know, fork into a parallel universe, get copies of like production data, get copies of like any of your services, make those changes, validate those changes, collapse it in, uh, without kind of having to just like reproduce everything across a, you know, a staging environment or all of those other things, right? So, yeah. Amazing. Uh, one thing I I was looking at your background, right? like um Bloomberg, Uber, there's nothing immediately that stands out to me as like okay this guy's going to found like the next great platform as a service. Uh what prepared you for real? It's almost like a curiosity just like ever go deeper, right? Um and so like you know started out on like front end stuff you know like working on the like wolf from like web mathematic and like porting it over there and then you know briefly moving to Bloomberg um and then moving towards Uber and like distributed systems and kind of like taking all the jump bikes uh kind of systems and and moving them over to a distributed uh system built on top of uh Cadence like uh the yeah the pre-temporal temporal by the way I'm happy to talk about pros and cons. Yeah, I think like it's like let's do the the railway story. And so like it's just been a a a continual step of like I I want this experience whether it is like walking up to like a bike and just unlocking it and like having it be like frictionless to like work or whatever and then like necessitating the like depth required to go in and make that happen, right? Like it it a lot of the work that that I do and a lot of the team does is like it's all in service of that experience, right? and like we fundamentally don't care like how deep we have to go whatever like we will swim to the bottom of the swimming pool to go and get the experience right um and I think that's what a lot of of you know kind of the trajectory was right and so it's not like I have a physics PhD or whatever I did like an EECS degree you know it it's just it's always been about just trying to figure out that next step of like how do we get there right um and that's like what's led to you know starting railway for that experience and then like moving all the way to bare metal data centers right like you know I was adding patches to the kernel this week Right. Just to like get the experience there cuz I'm like I see it and like how much better it can be. Right. Yeah. Patches to the L kernel this week. Yeah. Well, not upstream our our rail pack. No, this is different. This the OS on top of real pack. Yeah. No, this is like this is actual kernel like but it's it's always literally just what do we have to do to get that experience and just like figure it out, right? Like anything is figure outable, right? Like you'll just you'll just figure it out, you know? Um so would you send the patch upstream or is it just because like it doesn't fit with the It's like we have to we have to work out the experience for us in general.