← All episodes

Episode 139 · 63 min

Your Future Job Is a Decision Inbox — Max Deichmann Built the Layer That Gets You There // Co-Founder @ LangfuseMax Deichmann built Langfuse — the open-source LLM engineering platform acquired by ClickHouse — and explains why the engineer of the future isn't writing code, they're reviewing what agents did overnight.

Max Deichmann · CTO / Founder, Langfuse

Plays in the Podigee player. Podigee may set cookies after you press play.

Your Future Job Is a Decision Inbox — Max Deichmann Built the Layer That Gets You There // Co-Founder @ Langfuse

Max Deichmann, co-founder of Langfuse (acquired by ClickHouse), shares how his team built the open-source LLM engineering platform that became the observability layer for production AI agents and why the engineer's future job looks less like coding and more like managing a decision inbox.

The conversation covers the full stack of building and operating AI agents in production: pre-production testing, tracing, online evaluation, and the iteration loop that separates teams who are actually succeeding with agents from those chasing the hype. Max is unusually honest about where Langfuse itself still falls short, and what agentic workflows look like in practice, including copying 3am Slack alerts into Codex and waiting for the agent to start the investigation.

From the YC pivot that started it all to the half-page doc that led to the ClickHouse acquisition, this episode gives CTOs a grounded, no LinkedIn-filter view of where AI agents actually stand today.

Key topics:

  • Why traditional observability tools fail for non-deterministic AI applications
  • The Langfuse loop: pre-production testing, tracing, online evaluation, and iteration
  • Open source as a go-to-market strategy: adoption without a sales team
  • The ClickHouse acquisition: the two reasons that fit on half a page
  • Agentic on-call: how Max's team handles incidents with Codex today
  • The real state of agents in production, and where the hype still outpaces reality

Chapters.

  1. 00:00:00Intro & guest welcome
  2. 00:02:00Max's nerd origin story CS50 on a beach in Singapore
  3. 00:04:00Why they pivoted to Langfuse: firing customers mid-YC batch
  4. 00:06:00Building the first AI products and discovering the observability gap
  5. 00:07:00What Langfuse actually does: the LLM engineering platform explained
  6. 00:09:00Tracking business AND infrastructure metrics billing via Langfuse
  7. 00:10:00Open source from day one: trust, adoption, and hardening the product
  8. 00:13:00Go-to-market with 1.5 salespeople: how engineers sell to enterprises
  9. 00:14:00The acquisition story: 5 engineers, 40TB/day, and a Series A that became a sale
  10. 00:17:00What it felt like when half the AI ecosystem knocked on their door
  11. 00:18:00Life inside ClickHouse: cultural fit, Tokyo offsite, and what surprised them
  12. 00:20:00Agentic coding in practice: velocity per engineer, what still needs a human
  13. 00:22:00The planning loop: Claude summarising GitHub discussions, RFC → agent → review
  14. 00:23:00The "decision inbox" model: engineers as taste-makers and reviewers
  15. 00:27:00How to build an observability stack for the agentic era from scratch
  16. 00:29:00Agentic on-call: the 3 am Codex workflow and what's coming next
  17. 00:32:00Where Langfuse fits vs. traditional observability agent quality vs. infra health
  18. 00:35:00The real state of agents in production: the non-LinkedIn version

Next up. More from the top of the top.

All episodes →