The Hidden Layer Every AI Agent Runs On | Tony Holdstock-Brown, Inngest
The Hidden Layer Every AI Agent Runs On | Tony Holdstock-Brown, Inngest  
Podcast: The Peel with Turner Novak
Published On: Fri Jul 17 2026
Description: 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.comFlex: Premium banking, 60-day credit, 0% APR https://home.flex.one/referral/bananacapitalAmplitude: AI analytics https://www.amplitude.comMerge: Every model, one API https://www.merge.dev/turnerMonaco: 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 insaneReferencedInngest: https://www.inngest.com/Principles by Ray Dalio: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1501124021?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackTraction - How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591848369?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallbackFollow TonyTwitter: https://x.com/itstonyhbLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonyhb/Follow TurnerTwitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovakLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovakSubscribe to my newsletter to get every episode + the transcript in your inbox every week: https://www.thespl.it/