AI writes code in seconds. Checking that code is the new bottleneck.
One AI lab now runs more than two million builds a day, creating a traffic jam a startup wants to untangle.
This Week in Startups · Binance Hacked $6.3B Stolen, DoorDash Buys Instacart For $17B, Jake Newfield from Hermetiq, + More!Writing software used to be slow because someone had to type every line. Now "tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex" can generate code in seconds, says Jake Newfield, the co-founder and chief executive of Hermetic, a startup that works on software tools.
The delay has moved one step down the line, to what programmers call the build. That is the unglamorous work of compiling code, which means translating it into instructions a computer can run, and then verifying and testing it to make sure the new pieces do not break the old ones.
When artificial intelligence writes code at machine speed, the checks pile up. One top artificial intelligence lab now runs more than 2 million builds per day, according to Newfield, producing 4 billion individual build events that need to be tracked and analyzed. That customer pays his company, which he runs with a co-founder, $240,000 for that analysis.
Hermetic's bet is to sit in the middle of that traffic. Newfield says the company works with Bazel, a widely used system for managing builds, and its remote execution protocol, a way to spread build work across many computers, and organizes the flood of results so AI coding assistants can learn from them.
His comparison is to Databricks and Apache Spark. Spark is free, open software for processing huge amounts of data, and Databricks built a large business by making that data usable for companies. Hermetic wants to do the same thing for build data, becoming what Newfield calls "the data layer between builds and the AI agents themselves," meaning it turns build results into usable information that helps AI helpers handle builds on their own.
Newfield pitches a $25 billion market opportunity. He says the company has raised $2.2 million so far.
Questions people ask
What actually happens during a software build?
Compiling translates the code people write into the ones and zeros a computer executes. Testing then runs that program through a series of checks, from whether a single button works to whether the whole system still runs when thousands of parts change at once.
What are Bazel and the RBE protocol?
Bazel is an open-source tool originally developed inside Google for assembling large software projects from many pieces. The remote execution protocol lets companies spread that work across hundreds or thousands of computers at once, instead of waiting for one machine to finish.
What did Databricks do for Apache Spark?
Spark is open-source software for crunching very large datasets, and Databricks sells managed tools that make Spark easier and more reliable to use. Hermetic is using it as a business analogy: take a powerful but complicated open system, and sell the layer that makes its data useful.