Chris Lovejoy argues that winning in vertical AI is an organizational challenge, not just a technical one. He introduces a framework of three roles for domain experts—Oracle, Evaluator, and Architect—to effectively embed their knowledge into AI products, illustrated with case studies from companies like Granola and Anterior.
Stephen Chin of Neo4j argues that traditional RAG is insufficient because AI agents lose the reasoning behind past decisions. He introduces Context Graphs as a solution to capture the 'why' behind decisions, creating a queryable system of precedent that provides grounded, explainable, and auditable results.
A case study from PFF reveals how a two-engineer team, by leveraging AI agents, achieved a 25x increase in deployment frequency and 10x the output of a ten-engineer team. CTO Mike Spitz explains their core principle: shifting focus from making engineers faster to making AI agents faster. This talk deconstructs the resulting transformation, which eliminated traditional agile ceremonies like stand-ups and sprint planning in favor of an automated, spec-to-PR workflow, redefining the roles of engineers and processes in a modern software organization.
Pedro Rodrigues from Supabase shares key lessons from building an agent skill to work with Postgres and Supabase. He explains why critical security rules must go in the main skill file, the importance of pointing to living documentation, and how providing opinionated workflow guidance closes the reliability gap for agents in production systems.
Intercom doubled its engineering throughput in under a year by treating its AI coding agent not as a simple tool, but as a new senior engineer. This involved a full onboarding process onto their 15-year-old Rails monolith, creating a library of durable skills for recurring tasks, and providing audited access to all internal systems.
Kevlin Henney explores the limits of software abstraction, arguing that while software is an 'executable fiction,' it is ultimately constrained by the fundamental laws of physics. This talk deconstructs common metaphors like 'velocity' and 'roadmap' and delves into the real-world implications of physical constants like the speed of light and impossibility theorems like CAP.