How agentic software development will change databases

Agentic software development is reshaping database requirements in three key ways: evolutionary branching (agents create and discard database branches rapidly, with some projects reaching 500+ iterations), scale-to-zero economics (half of agentic app databases have compute lifetimes under 10 seconds, making fixed-cost databases unviable), and openness (agents trained on open-source ecosystems like Postgres operate more reliably with open interfaces and storage formats). Databricks's Lakebase addresses these needs with O(1) copy-on-write branching, sub-second scale-to-zero elasticity, and open Postgres page format storage on cloud object storage. A telling data point: AI agents in Lakebase now create roughly 4x more databases than human users.