Ardent

Ardent is database branching infrastructure for AI agents and the teams that run them, built by ArdentAI, Inc. It connects to an existing Postgres database, keeps a read replica fed by logical replication, and creates isolated branches from that replica. A branch is a full Postgres instance with your schema, data, grants, row-level security policies, functions and triggers.

The problem it targets is familiar to anyone who has pointed an automated coding agent at a database. Shared staging drifts from production, seed files miss edge cases, and one bad migration can take down the primary. Ardent gives each task its own connection URL. Agents can read, write, run migrations and break things, then the branch gets deleted. The pitch is a database sandbox for every task: the real schema, the real rows, none of the shared staging. Plenty of tools promise database branching for AI agents. Ardent's version does it without moving you to a new database provider.

The main limits are worth knowing up front. It handles Postgres only, branches are snapshots taken at creation, and large databases take a while during first connector setup.

Getting Started

1. Install the CLI with npm install -g ardent-cli and run ardent login.
2. Export your connection string as ARDENT_DB_URL and run ardent connector preflight postgresql "$ARDENT_DB_URL". If preflight prints a grant script, run it on the source database first.
3. Create the connector with ardent connector create postgresql "$ARDENT_DB_URL". Setup runs on Ardent's side and can take minutes to hours on large databases.
4. Run ardent branch create my-feature, then ardent branch info to get the branch connection URL.
5. Point your app or agent at that URL. Delete the branch with ardent branch delete when the work is done.