Josh Albrecht, CTO of Imbue, discusses the engineering challenges in building reliable AI coding agents. He introduces Sculptor, an experimental environment designed to build trust in AI-generated code by focusing on preventing and detecting problems through structured workflows, automated testing, and AI-driven analysis, moving beyond simple code generation to create maintainable software.
Explore the shift from manual coding to AI-driven development. This session covers the mechanics of AI coding agents like OpenHands, best practices for using them effectively without accumulating tech debt, and practical use cases, emphasizing the continued importance of human oversight and critical thinking in software engineering.
Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition AI, discusses the exponential growth of AI capabilities in software engineering, likening it to a "Moore's Law for AI agents" with a doubling time of every 70 days. He chronicles the evolution of their AI agent, Devin, from handling repetitive code migrations to autonomously managing entire backlogs, highlighting the key technical challenges and paradigm shifts at each stage.
Rakesh Kumar from Lyft details the evolution of their real-time feature generation platform, from cron jobs to a sophisticated streaming architecture using Apache Beam and Flink. Key discussions include solving the 'hot shard' problem with geohashes, building a custom geospatial feature store, and optimizing pipelines with YAML-based configurations.
Randy Shoup, SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market, shares insights on architectural evolution, detailing the transition from monoliths to microservices, the principles of building effective platform engineering teams using DORA metrics, and how core distributed systems patterns have both endured and evolved.
Babak Hodjat, CTO of AI at Cognizant and a co-inventor of the technology behind Siri, discusses the strategic shift from generative AI to autonomous, multi-agent systems. He explores how these agentic systems will redefine enterprise operations, the intense "arms race" for AI talent, and the critical need for a decentralized, secure framework for agent collaboration.