Adaptive Computer chooses Turso ephemeral databases to power AI agents that build and modify software

Hi I’m Mike Soylu, Co-founder of Adaptive Computer. We’re building AC1, a web based AI computer that lets you build and deploy complete apps with natural language - from idea to an actual, live app in minutes. A truly “personal” computer that you can change and mold.

A lot of things go into making actual apps that people want to use but databases are an essential component you need to get right. And a major challenge in making databases work well with AI systems is making them fault tolerant. We need complete control over our databases over every change made by our systems so that we can roll them back if something goes wrong.

Essentially we need infinite databases, and we need to be able to spin them up and destroy them quickly.

#How we landed on Turso

We knew right away that we needed something like SQLite, since a database is just a file and very lightweight, and we need to scale to potentially millions, fast. So we started by looking at Cloudflare D1. They were great, but the problem is that they’re building D1 to focus on very specific website use cases, using their platform as the centerpiece. And, crucially, they didn’t support quickly provisioning apps that are preconfigured.

In fact, no one else really does this except for Turso. So, it quickly became apparent that was the solution. With Turso we can use their Platform API to instantly spin up any amount of databases, and we can use schema databases to pre-configure them for their purpose.

#How we use Turso

We then can use Turso’s Branching feature to split off a database the moment an AI agent takes an action, like adding todos to a calendar app based on a natural language input by a user, it creates its own working environment so it can do the changes. We can then validate that it works before merging it into the new db. If the AI screws up, we can instantly roll back that change with no fallout.

No one can do this like Turso - it’s very fast, since it’s just an API call. And in terms of scalability, that’s no problem either - last count, in September, we had 40,000 databases on Turso. And we’re still in alpha.

The best part is that the AI knows SQLite, but we don’t have to, and it works so well.

As an aside, it’s really cool as a developer to see what Turso is doing from the technical side. Just the idea of forking an ancient db library like SQLite to breathe new life into it, philosophically, I like supporting that.

#Future plans

AI can do a lot for us beyond web apps. Think of manufacturing, for example. How efficient factories would get if people could change the software that runs those machines in real time. Or imagine medical software - we’ve all been to the hospital and said “oh what is that Windows XP thing you’re using?” Clearly, they’re not using archaic software because it’s better. They’re using it because it would cost them a fortune to change. We want to fix this.

Once you start to believe AI can solve software, you can think about all these things that interface with humans and imagine what could be done.

#Conclusion

We’ll have a lot more to say on those topics in the near future. But, for now, AC1 is in open alpha now and we invite you to try it out!