Show HN: Pgclaw – A "Clawdbot" in every row with 400 lines of Postgres SQL

[calebhwin]

Hi HN,

Been hacking on a simple way to run agents entirely inside of a Postgres database, "an agent per row".

Things you could build with this: * Your own agent orchestrator * A personal assistant with time travel * (more things I can't think of yet)

Not quite there yet but thought I'd share it in its current state.

[maxbond]

What's the advantage in putting agents in the persistence layer rather than the application layer? This seems to me strictly less flexible, scalable, secure, easy to work with... I am having a hard time imagining why I would want to integrate with APIs or write an agentic harness in the database rather than in application code?

Maybe I'm behind the times but I don't understand.

[4ndrewl]

It's similar to when we wrote all our business logic in eg pl/sql, stored procedures etc. Seems attractive at first, but it breaks separation of concerns, becomes difficult to test etc.

[tibbar]

This is mind-bending. I can't imagine that it performs well enough to be particularly fit for production just yet but..... wow.

[swyx]

how exactly is adding a stored procedure as an agent mind bending

[wwweston]

This... does not seem like separation of concerns.

Not to mention that the data layer seems like the one where you want to keep things most deterministic.

[nkmnz]

If you really want to run an agent on each created row, you could run this in a replica and stream the replies back to your system of record.

[noupdates]

To decouple this the person would have to broadcast nearly every event and rebuild the observer layers elsewhere.

[jmaw]

What does it mean to put an agent inside of a PG DB? Is PG doing the actual computing/inference (does it tie to GPU), or is PG just storing the state of the agents neural net (is that a thing, it seems like it would be).

Maybe I'm strictly too stupid to even parse the concept, but I don't understand what I'm looking at one bit.

[debugnik]

I don't understand why claw is a data type for columns in these examples, it doesn't seem to store any actual per-row state. Is it not possible to hook extensions onto "with" clauses or something similar?

[rel_ic]

We need your help! Can you please use your creativity to build resilience to climate change in your community instead of experimenting with more ways to spend computing power?

[brunoqc]

The solution is to tax the rich. But we won't.

[xnx]

It feels like we're a week away from the Claw hype supplanting AI hype. Companies will start renaming things ClawX to get on the hype bandwagon.

[maxbond]

I think "claw" isn't appealing enough to be genericized and that "agent" will continue to be the generic term, but we'll see.

[calebhwin]

It's just an abstraction people are excited about at the moment. Langchain was an exciting abstraction at one point.

My bet is we converge on a super minimal model<>computer architecture.

[ef2k]

Nice. These are the kind of boundary pushing projects I like to see. It challenges assumptions of where application logic should live. The implications around cost, latency, and recovery are going to be interesting.

[readme]

i love postgres and pgvector... this is exactly to my tastes

[cpursley]

Yes, and I imagine pgclaw would pair well with pgmq and pg_cron for scheduled work. Postgres really is enough: https://postgresisenough.dev

[calebhwin]

Same, it's in a similar vein as pgvector - probably not as performant as turbopuffer or chroma but you get the benefits of being in a really nice ecosystem.

[danr4]

this is fucking awesome