TL;DR. Lakebase is Neon's Postgres inside Databricks, so an agent gets its own branch of production in seconds. Governed tables sync into it and read back in under 10ms, and every write the agent makes to a change-feed table lands in a Delta table in Unity Catalog about 15 seconds later. Branches are one-way and nothing merges back. You rehearse on the branch, decide from the rows it changed, and replay the approved change as a migration. I ran the branching half on Neon myself: ten agents, ten branches, all ten deleted.

Almost every agent running inside a company today is read-only. It searches, it summarises, it answers questions about data somebody else already wrote down, and it changes nothing.

Nobody sat in a meeting and decided this. It is what you get when the first serious question about a pilot is "what happens when it's wrong", and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. So the write path gets taken away.

Databricks has an agent framework, and so does everybody.…