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

If you are writing code by hand, you are doing this wrong, right? 如果你还在手写代码，那你方向就错了，对吧？ 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. 你写的代码，工具现在已经足够好了，可以让你跑得极快，虽然确实有各种问题和痛点之类的。 Um, but you should be reviewing the code that you are writing instead of trying to go and write it by hand. 嗯，但你应该做的是审查你写的代码，而不是自己费劲去手写它。 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. 那些架构模式，那些其他的东西，你不是要把它们扔进垃圾桶或者什么的。 Actually, they matter more now than than than any other time. 恰恰相反，它们现在比任何时候都更重要。 But you just shouldn't spend your time generating code that you would write. 只是你不应该把时间花在生成你自己本来会写的代码上。 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. 如果你知道怎么写，就让 agent 去写，然后反复调整，直到看起来像你自己写的为止。 Before we get into today's episode, I just have a small message for listeners. 在今天的节目开始之前，我有一条小消息要告诉听众们。 Thank you. 谢谢你们。 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. 如果你们不选择点进来收听我们的内容，我们就无法为你们带来这些 AI 工程、科学和娱乐内容。 We've been approached by sponsors on an almost daily basis. 赞助商几乎每天都在联系我们。 But fortunately, enough of you actually subscribe to us to keep all this sustainable without ads, and we want to keep it that way. 但幸运的是，有足够多的人实际订阅了我们，让这一切在没有广告的情况下可持续运营，我们希望保持这样。 But I just have one favor to ask all of you. 但我只有一个请求要拜托大家。 The single most powerful, completely free thing you can do is to click that subscribe button. 你能做的最强大、完全免费的事，就是点击那个订阅按钮。 It's the only thing I'll ever ask of you. 这是我唯一会请求你们做的事。 And it means absolutely everything to me and my team that works so hard to bring the Inspace to you each and every week. 这对我和我那么努力每周为你们带来 Latent Space 的团队来说意义重大。 If you do it, I promise you we'll never stop working to make the show even better. 如果你这么做了，我保证我们永远不会停止努力让节目更好。 Now, let's get into it. 好了，开始吧。 Hey everyone, welcome to the latest space podcast. 大家好，欢迎来到 Latent Space 播客。 This is Allesio, founder of Colonel Labs, and I'm joined by Swixs, editor of Len Space. 我是 Alessio，Decibel Partners 的创始人，和我在一起的是 swyx，Latent Space 的主编。 Hey. 嘿。 Hey. 嘿。 And today we're in the studio with Jay Cooper of Railway, 今天我们在录音室迎来了 Railway 的 Jake Cooper， conductor of railway. Railway 的 conductor。 Conductor at railway. Railway 的 conductor。 Yeah. 是的。 Choo choo. Choo choo。 Have that like anywhere on like your 这个头衔有没有印在你的 Well, we like we roughly call like people in 嗯，我们大概把公司里的人叫做 Well, I don't have a business card. 我没有名片。 Um we're not we're not that big yet. 嗯，我们还没那么大。 Um at some point I will. 嗯，到时候我会弄的。 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. Super Micro 的人递给我一张漂亮的名片，我当时就想，哇，这还挺正式的。 Um 嗯 business cards. 名片。 Yeah. 对。 Yeah, they're they're cool. 对，挺酷的。 Um they're hip. 嗯，很时髦。 They're jiggy. 很时尚。 Um but yeah, the the whole conductor thing, like we call some of our volunteer moderators conductors, you know. 嗯，conductor 这个称号嘛，我们把部分志愿版主也叫做 conductor。 Yeah. 嗯。 So, it's a good one. 挺好的。 It's a good one. 挺好的。 Like, we're trying to figure out what we want to call each other internally. 我们一直在想，内部到底想怎么互称。 And there's like varying levels of um thought. 大家的想法各有不同。 Some people are like,"Oh, it's super cringe." 有人觉得，哦，这太尬了。 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." 比如说，内部同事根本不需要专属称号，但也有人说，哦对，我们想这么互称之类的。 I was like,"We still don't have a really good one." 我当时就说，我们还没找到一个真正好的叫法。 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. 你知道，我们想过新铁道兵、trineiac 之类的，但都没有感觉特别对。 Um 嗯 okay so well for those who don't know what is railway let's give people a crisp definition up front. 好，那对于不了解的人，Railway 是什么？先给大家一个简洁的定义。 Yeah, railway is the easiest way to ship anything. 好，Railway 是发布任何东西最简单的方式。 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? 你只需要打开 canvas，或者跟 Claude 对话，说部署一个 Postgres 实例，部署我的 GitHub 仓库，运行这段代码，等等，对吧？ Um and you'll just be up and away to the races, right? 嗯，然后你就直接起跑了，对吧？ Um 嗯 yeah, you have a nice animation on the landing page. 你们落地页的动效很好看。 Oh well, thank you. 哦，谢谢。 Um none of my work by the way. 嗯，那不是我做的。 They don't let me touch any of the design stuff anymore. 他们不让我碰设计这块了。 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. 但对，我们希望不只是让部署变得简单，还要让你能随着时间推移，几乎像有机体一样演化你的应用。 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? 我们认为，现在大部分工具就像是在熵上不断堆熵，对吧？ So you have like Docker and Cube and then like Ansible scripts and all of these other things, right? 你有 Docker、Kubernetes，然后各种 Ansible 脚本，各种各样的东西，对吧？ 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? 如果我们能帮你把所有软件版本化，追踪所有变更，那就能让克隆环境变得极其简单，你知道，分叉到一个平行宇宙，获取生产数据的副本，获取任意服务的副本，做出修改，验证修改，合并进来，而不需要在 staging 环境里把一切重新搭一遍，对吧？ So, 所以， yeah. 对。 Amazing. 厉害。 Uh, one thing I I was looking at your background, right? 嗯，我看了你的经历，对吧？ 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. Bloomberg、Uber，没有什么能让我立刻联想到，哦，这个人要去创立下一个伟大的 PaaS。 Uh what prepared you for real? 是什么让你准备好做 Railway 的？ It's almost like a curiosity just like ever go deeper, right? 好像就是一种好奇心，不断往更深处走，对吧？ 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 嗯，从前端开始，做过 Wolfram 的 web 移植，后来短暂去了 Bloomberg，然后去了 Uber，接触到分布式系统，把 Jump Bikes 的系统迁移到基于 Cadence like uh the yeah the pre-temporal temporal Cadence 的分布式系统，也就是 Temporal 的前身。 by the way I'm happy to talk about pros and cons. 顺便说，我很乐意聊优缺点。 Yeah, I think like it's like let's do the the railway story. 好，我觉得就先聊 Railway 的故事吧。 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? 就是一步一步往前走，我想要某种体验，无论是走近一辆自行车就能解锁、毫无摩擦地骑走，还是别的什么，然后这种渴望就倒逼你去弄懂背后需要什么深度，对吧？ 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? 我做的大部分事情，团队做的大部分事情，都是为了那个体验服务的，对吧？ 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 我们根本不在乎要往多深处走，无论如何，游泳到池底也要把体验做出来， right 对 um 嗯 and I think that's what a lot of of you know kind of the trajectory was right 我觉得这条轨迹大体就是这样，对吧？ 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 我没有物理学博士，就是个 EECS 学位，就是一直在想下一步怎么做到，对吧？ 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 嗯，这就是创立 Railway 的动力，然后一路走到裸金属数据中心，你知道，我这周还在给内核打补丁。 Right. 对。 Just to like get the experience there cuz 就是为了把体验做出来，因为 I'm like I see it and like how much better it can be. 我看得到它应该有多好。 Right. 对。 Yeah. 是的。 Patches to the L kernel this week. 这周给内核打补丁。 Yeah. 对。 Well, not upstream our our 不是提交到上游，是我们自己的 rail pack. Railpack。 No, this is different. This the OS on top of real pack. 不，这是不同的东西，这是 Railpack 之上的操作系统。 Yeah. 是的。 No, this is like this is actual kernel like but it's it's always literally just 不，这是真正的内核层面，但归根结底就是 what do we have to do to get that experience and just like figure it out, right? 要做什么才能达到那个体验，然后想办法搞定，对吧？ Like anything is figure outable, right? 什么事情都是能搞定的，对吧？ Like you'll just you'll just figure it out, you know? 你就是想办法搞定，你知道吗？ Um so 嗯，那 would you send the patch upstream or is it just because like it doesn't fit with the 你会把这个补丁提交到上游，还是因为它不符合 It's like we have to we have to work out the experience for us in general. 我们要先把这个体验给自己弄通。