Move Fast and Don't Break Things: Scaling Databases for the AI Era — PlanetScale

AI agents are multiplying traffic overnight. Here's how to ship fast without taking your database down with it. Ben Dicken from PlanetScale argues you no longer have to choose between moving fast and keeping things up. He covers the principles behind reliable infrastructure, isolation and redundancy, then how to scale with sharding, back pressure and decoupling, the same ideas PlanetScale uses to run databases for fast-growing AI companies like Cursor. Then he gets to agents: how a simple VSchema JSON file lets an agent design a sharding plan for Vitess, how Traffic Control sets resource budgets so a surge of agent traffic degrades gracefully instead of crashing, and how database branching, deploy requests and one-click reverts let agents change schemas safely. His point: good developer experience turns out to be good primitives for AI. In this talk: • Isolation and redundancy, and why failures become weekly at scale • Sharding, back pressure and decoupling explained • Letting agents design a Vitess sharding scheme from a JSON VSchema • Traffic Control budgets, schema branching and one-click reverts for agents SPEAKER Ben Dicken, PlanetScale LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjdicken/ X: https://x.com/BenjDicken GitHub: https://github.com/bddicken Website: https://benjdd.com LINKS PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com Database Traffic Control: https://planetscale.com/database-traffic-control Neki (sharded Postgres): https://planetscale.com/blog/announcing-neki PlanetScale on X: https://x.com/planetscale CHAPTERS 0:00 Intro 1:02 Outages at AI scale 2:22 Three parts 2:57 About PlanetScale 3:32 Isolation 4:32 Redundancy 7:01 Sharding 8:26 Back pressure 9:41 Decoupling 11:21 Giving agents control of infrastructure 12:56 Agents designing a VSchema 14:51 Traffic Control 15:55 Branching your database 16:50 Reverts without data loss 17:45 Good DX is good for agents Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco. Subscribe for more talks from the engineers building with AI. AI Engineer: https://ai.engineer YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer X: https://x.com/aiDotEngineer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aidotengineer/ #Databases #PlanetScale #AIEngineer