Forward: Evolving Tinybird for the AI-native developer

Want to stay updated?
Register for the Tinybird newsletter.

We're excited to announce a major evolution of Tinybird: Forward.

This isn't just a new feature or two - it's a fundamental shift in how Tinybird works, designed to make building real-time data applications faster and more intuitive than ever before.

You can start using Tinybird Forward by installing the CLI and reading the quick start guide.

What we’ve been hearing from our customers

Over the past year, we've had many, many conversations with Tinybird users.

In those conversations, they have praised the platform's speed, lauded our support and reliability, and even celebrated the user experience that allows them to quickly deploy real-time APIs

At the same time, they shared common points of friction:

• "I love how fast I can get started with Tinybird, but as our project grows, managing schema changes and promoting changes across environments has become a real pain point."
• "The workflow doesn't align well with our development practices - we need better support for CI/CD and version control."
• "Getting to production is fast, but once there, it's hard to iterate on the schema and manage data projects."
• “I can’t run Tinybird locally or on my own infrastructure, which means my local dev and CI pipelines require cloud dependencies.”

These comments revealed a pattern: our most sophisticated users, particularly development teams building large-scale, data-intensive applications, were struggling to maintain and iterate their Tinybird deployments when it mattered most.

At the same time, software development is changing

We've all been observing a fundamental shift in development workflows driven by AI adoption:

1. AI-assisted development is becoming the norm, not the exception. Going from idea to prototype has never been faster, and developers are using AI to plan new work, write code, debug issues, and understand complex systems faster than ever before.
2. Software teams remain small for longer while building increasingly sophisticated applications. The leverage that each developer has is multiplying.
3. The development workflow is evolving - developers expect their tools to work seamlessly with their existing AI-native workflows and to get out of their way.

We are witnessing the beginnings of a massive shift in how software is built. Soon, AI agents will handle much of the heavy lifting in development, with humans focusing on higher-level direction and decision-making.

How Forward meets the moment

Tinybird Forward revamps the Tinybird user experience to both support experienced engineers maintaining large-scale real-time data projects in production and align with the incoming reality of AI-native development.

Here's what's new with Forward:

• A fantastic local-first development experience, with much faster feedback loops (build times reduced from 30+ seconds to 150ms).

• AI-assisted features for faster bootstrapping and development. Just tb create --prompt "..." and Tinybird will build your first version in seconds.

• End-to-end testing (CI/CD pipelines) without cloud integrations.
• Single-command deployment of your data project
• Automated schema migrations and API changes in live, production projects.

• Native integration with AI coding agents to enable context awareness without an external server dependency.
• Self-managed Tinybird, available for free. Just run tb infra and follow the prompts to deploy Tinybird to your own cloud (AWS for now, others coming soon).

As much as possible, we've kept the things people love about Tinybird (fast, scalable, easy to get to production) and addressed the things that hindered experienced developers. We've made Tinybird both more approachable to start and more dependable in production.

Building for an AI-native future

We're not just adapting to how developers work today - we're building for how we believe developers will work tomorrow. Forward is designed from the ground up to be AI-native, making it the perfect platform for the next generation of development workflows.

This means:

1. Seamless integration with AI coding assistants - Forward works beautifully with tools like Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot and other AI coding assistants.
2. AI-assisted project generation and testing - Use natural language to generate project scaffolding, test cases, and more.
3. A CLI designed for both human and AI interaction - Clear, consistent interfaces that work well whether you're typing commands or an AI agent is generating them for you.
4. Simplified primitives that are easy to reason about - just data sources and pipes, making it easier for both humans and AI to understand and manipulate your data project.

What's next

Tinybird Forward is available today for all new users. We're incredibly excited about what it makes possible, and we're already seeing positive feedback from early adopters.

Existing users can migrate right away (contact us for support) or remain in the classic Tinybird experience. 

If you want to learn more about the specific changes we've made and continue to make, follow our launch over the next week as we dive into the new CLI and the local-first experience, or just install the CLI, read the quick start, and build your first API in minutes. 

The future of application development is real-time, data-intensive, and AI-assisted. We're building Tinybird Forward to be the platform that makes that future possible. Let’s fucking go.

Want to stay updated?
Register for the Tinybird newsletter.