Airbyte Agents

AI

agent data layer

SHOW HN2026

156points
48comments
#409of 4,366 in 2026
Top 10%of 2026 by points

How HN took it

CuriousMostly questions and neutral comments

8 positive, 27 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 4 critical, out of 39 comments about the project. Thread score +0.13.

Idea: 5 for, 3 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Congratulations and interest in the launch; Airbyte's connector expertise seen as a good fit

    From 3 comments
    • This is such a great direction airbyte is taking and congrats to the lunch! I think you're very well-positioned for this opportunity than most people realize, given your…
      nerdright on HN
    • We built something similar an A/B testing framework that measures Unblocked's impact on real AI coding agents. It spawns agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot)…
      dennispi on HN
    • Super interesting idea! Congrats on the launch. Context is definitely something that is lacking in my experience. Im always frustrated when an agent cannot answer…
      thecopy on HN

Objections

  • Benchmarks are self-run by the builder, so bias is a concern

    From 2 comments
    • The maker's post
    • Just want to call out a couple of nuances in our methodology. In general, we tried our best to do apples-to-apples comparisons where we could, and gave ourselves a discount where…
      mtricot on HN
  • Skills may already solve the problem; SaaS API tollgates may block replication

    From 2 comments
    • Doesn't Skills solve all of this? OpenClaw, Hermes and other agents have already made skill adoption mainstream? Are you guys still seeing a future where people are dumping…
      Tsarp on HN
    • More and more SaaS companies like ServiceNow or Hubspot are creating new tollgates for agent api calls. How do you think will this impact Airbyte Agents? I guess that replicating…
      ck_one on HN
  • Seen as just an ETL pipeline rebranded as an agent

    From 1 comment
    • Congrats, you built an ETL pipeline and called it an agent. The industry has come full circle.
      afxuh on HN

Requests

  • Support for direct SQL access to the Context Store

    From 2 comments
    • The prompts you mentioned here sound like SQL. Is there any way to run actual SQL on these systems? Is "agents need to poke around endlessly" a symptom of the fact that there…
      andai on HN
    • Helpful feedback, thank you! And your instincts are spot on. As of now, we have API based search, with filter predicates and field selection in JSON. While we haven't published…
      aaronsteers on HN
  • Parquet file download option from APIs

    From 1 comment
    • There are a lot of APIs like this that I really wish would expose downloading a parquet file instead of trying to implement server-side filtering and reporting query features.
      carefulfungi on HN

Questions

  • How is stale data handled when operational data changes

    From 2 comments
    • How would you know if the agent is not querying stale data here ?
      SachitRafa on HN
    • Your observation of 47 steps is very good to show the situation, probably, this connected with schema navigation, not with data fetching. I think this is very good place to…
      dubovskiyIM on HN
  • How encryption, confidentiality and data authorization are handled

    From 2 comments
    • Super interesting idea! Congrats on the launch. Context is definitely something that is lacking in my experience. Im always frustrated when an agent cannot answer…
      thecopy on HN
    • What are the main differences to Glean? My company is evaluating Glean and I feel like Airbyte is a strong alternative (at least for some use cases). How does Airbyte handle data…
      smadam9 on HN
  • How the Context Store selects fields and handles indexing

    From 2 comments
    • Looks interesting! If I'm reading correctly, the indexing (Context Store) is neutral/unopinionated? How does it select fields for indexing? Have you done any testing on guided…
      jessewmc on HN
    • Hi, @jessewmc. Thanks for your reply. Regarding your points: > If I'm reading correctly, the indexing (Context Store) is neutral/unopinionated? How does it select fields for…
      aaronsteers on HN

Alternatives named

  • Glean

    From 1 comment
    • What are the main differences to Glean? My company is evaluating Glean and I feel like Airbyte is a strong alternative (at least for some use cases). How does Airbyte handle data…
      smadam9 on HN
  • Vendor MCP servers such as Gong, Zendesk, Linear and Salesforce

    From 2 comments
    • The maker's post
    • Just want to call out a couple of nuances in our methodology. In general, we tried our best to do apples-to-apples comparisons where we could, and gave ourselves a discount where…
      mtricot on HN
  • Unblocked MCP server

    From 1 comment
    • We built something similar an A/B testing framework that measures Unblocked's impact on real AI coding agents. It spawns agent CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot)…
      dennispi on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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