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PC Paul Copplestone On Latent Space

“Building software is debatably a solved problem. Maintaining, like keeping things running, is a whole different beast.”

Latent Space · AI Builders · October 2026

“Building software is debatably a solved problem. Maintaining, like keeping things running, is a whole different beast.” — Paul Copplestone, Latent Space

Context

The Supabase CEO agrees with the Latent Space host that AI for site reliability engineering, keeping production systems running, is one of the hardest areas for agent startups and hasn't been cracked yet.

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Transcript

Latent Space Around 1:15:37 into the episode
Paul Copplestone

All of those people, please apply it. Hopefully they listen to the podcast. Yeah,

Speaker 1

yeah, no. I mean, yeah, we probably do have a lot of gray beards in SREs. I think one of I have been on the record as saying AI SRE is one of the hardest categories for agent startups. I think I might be wrong soon, but so far it's been correct. Okay, AI has not cracked SRE for whatever reason. No,

Paul Copplestone

no, no, no, not yet. I agree. Like building software is debatable, solve problem. Maintaining, like keeping things running is a whole different beast.

Speaker 1

Well, okay. Well, thank you for keeping things running for everyone else. You guys, congrats on your journey, man. Like, I'm so proud to be your friend. Thanks, guys. And an investor. And it's just like, just see the progress. I cannot wait for the IPO, whenever that is. It looks like it's going to…

Ant Wilson

Definitely, man.

Speaker 1

Thanks for that. Thanks, Javanese.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Latent Space

“We don't have a single Rust developer in the room. … The two things that mattered most were the plan to do the thing and then the verification of the thing, because the actual implementation was Claude writing code. And so what we ended up doing was we literally built an entire fork of the entire API in Rust and then started running shadow traffic through it and verifying the outputs.” — Angela Jiang, Latent Space “Because of agent training data, it's very hard to deprecate things now. We see that agents often love using old versions of Modal syntax. And it's kind of hard to nudge them away from that. So we've actually had to be a little bit more conservative ... with how we deprecate and remove features.” — Erik Bernhardsson, Latent Space