Ably vs Depot
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Ably is spinning up an AI-agent transport layer at 0.x speed
Ably is iterating hard on a new AI Transport SDK — four releases (0.2 through 0.5) in about a month — aimed at making agent conversations durable, resumable, and branchable over its realtime channels. Alongside it, the core Pub/Sub and Chat SDKs keep getting steady, mostly incremental maintenance: React hook ergonomics, presence reliability fixes, and better LiveObjects visibility in the dashboard.
The AI Transport line is the story. Each release layers on capability that matters for production agents — declarative codecs, external data hydration, and now durable execution that survives process restarts inside frameworks like Temporal and Vercel's WDK. Ably is positioning its realtime infrastructure as the transport substrate for AI agents, not just chat and pub/sub, while keeping the mature core SDKs stable. The frequent breaking changes signal a product still finding its API shape.
Expect the AI Transport SDK to keep its fast breaking-change cadence toward a 1.0 with a stabilized session/run API, and likely SDKs beyond JS as the surface settles. The entries don't yet indicate a GA date.
Depot extends from build acceleration into hosted source control with Depot Code.
Depot is broadening from a CI and build-cache company into a full developer-infrastructure platform. This cycle it launched Depot Code — a diskless git server backed by S3 blob storage — into private beta, moved CI and Sandboxes onto a re-architected Depot Metal compute tier, and kept extending Depot CI with new triggers, snapshot improvements, OIDC auth, and Datadog observability.
The direction is a vertically integrated build-and-source stack: Depot Code stores git packfiles as S3 objects and runs stateless git workers, mirroring the same storage-compute separation behind Depot Metal. Each piece plugs into Depot CI, so the company is assembling an end-to-end alternative to the hub-and-spoke GitHub model rather than just accelerating it. The CI surface is maturing in parallel with reliability and integration features.
Expect Depot Code to move toward wider access and tighter Depot CI integration, and GitHub Actions runners and container builds to migrate onto Depot Metal over the coming months as promised.
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