Ground Truth or Dare: Using Oracles to Make Postgres Reactive

Live SQL is the holy grail of realtime. Subscribe to any SQL query, with joins, aggregates and ordering, and the result stays live as your data changes. It’s easy to describe but very hard to build. At Electric, we spent years chasing it. Then we joined Neon and built it in weeks with coding agents, inside Postgres.

Live queries are database infrastructure. This isn’t code you hand to an agent and hope for the best. So we used Postgres’s own query engine as an oracle. Once the agents had the ability to verify their own work, they could go super fast and burn down through the featue requirements.

In this talk, I’ll cover what we built, how we built it and how oracles let us have both truth and dare: to get it right and ship fast with agents.