Are self-driving databases the Waymos of the future? In Episode 35 of Talking Postgres, Luigi Nardi—founder and CEO of DBtune and Stanford researcher—joins Claire Giordano to explore his journey from academic research to Level 5 autonomous database tuning. We dig into Luigi’s early days with a Commodore 64, how he began his PhD in Paris before he had learned to speak French, and how "professor privilege" in Sweden helped him bootstrap his startup. You’ll learn why the DBtune team chose database tuning and Postgres as their focus, what the Jevons paradox means for the future of developers, and how the “Level 5” vision fuels the DBtune team’s work toward a truly self-driving system.

Previously on Talking Postgres:

• Talking Postgres Ep30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison
• Talking Postgres Ep23: How I got started as a developer & in Postgres with Daniel Gustafsson

Links mentioned in this episode:

• CFP: POSETTE: An Event for Postgres 2026’s CFP closes on Sun Feb 1, 2026 @ 11:59pm PST
• Video of POSETTE 2024 talk: Autotuning PostgreSQL on Azure Flexible Server, by Luigi Nardi
• Video of PGConf India 2025 talk: ML for Systems and Systems for ML, by Luigi Nardi
• PGConf India 2025: Round Table Discussion about AI
• Oxide and Friends podcast: Engineering Rigor in the LLM Age
• Wikipedia: Jevons paradox
• Wikipedia: Neuro-symbolic AI
• Conference: PGDay Lowlands (Boriss Mejías calls it the second-best Postgres conference in Europe)
• Calendar invite: LIVE recording of Ep36 of Talking Postgres to happen on Wed Feb 18, 2026