Why Do AI Agents Need Compute Next to the Database?

Paul Copplestone says Supabase Edge Functions, which run on Deno, stop at about two seconds. That limit is too short for the jobs coding agents actually run, such as chunking text and writing embeddings.

Supabase Compute is the longer-running replacement announced for the conference. It is serverless, it sits on the same private network as the database, and a task can open a Postgres connection from there. It is not limited to Deno. A team can use Rust or Python, or run an agent in the instance. He compares it to a container-style Lambda: a full machine beside the data, rather than an edge function that dies at two seconds.