// the find
electric-sql/electric
The agent platform built on sync.
Electric is a read-path Postgres sync engine that streams table data to clients over HTTP, with partial replication controlled by 'Shapes' — filtered subscriptions like `WHERE user_id = $1`. It's genuinely useful for reactive UIs and agent workflows that need live Postgres data without polling. The 'agent platform' tagline is marketing; it's a sync primitive, not a platform.
The HTTP-based sync protocol integrates with CDNs, so fan-out to thousands of clients doesn't mean thousands of persistent connections to your backend — that's a real architectural win. Shapes are expressive: you subscribe to a SQL-filtered slice of a table and Electric handles differential updates, including deletes. No special Postgres fork required — standard logical replication on any managed Postgres works. The examples (burn, deep-survey) are full working apps with agent + sync integration, not contrived demos.
Read-path only — the write path is entirely your problem. Building optimistic UI or local-first writes means rolling your own mutation layer and conflict handling, which is where most of the complexity lives in sync systems. The CRDT topic tag is misleading: the 1.x rewrite dropped CRDT support that existed in old PG-Electric. If you came here for CRDTs, this isn't it. The LiveDashboard endpoint ships unauthenticated by default — they warn about it, but it's a misconfiguration waiting to expose internal BEAM VM state in production. The dev setup requires asdf managing Elixir/OTP plus Node for TypeScript tests, which adds nontrivial friction for contributors not already in the Elixir ecosystem.