Jul 22, 2026

Claude for Long-Horizon Tasks — Lance Martin, Anthropic

Lance Martin from Anthropic shares insights into building reliable and secure long-horizon agents with Claude. He details architectural principles like decoupling the 'brain' from the 'hands' for reliability and security, implementing independent verifiers for self-correction, and developing advanced self-learning memory systems akin to human memory's in-band writing and offline 'dreaming' consolidation. The talk concludes with a vision for evolving agent harnesses towards organizational-level, proactive, and multiplayer capabilities.

Jul 21, 2026

2026 State of AI Engineering — Barr Yaron, Amplify Partners

Barr Yaron's 2026 AI engineering survey reveals key trends: audio and image generation are rapidly gaining traction, while cost is now a primary engineering constraint. Agents are evolving to take actions within systems, but control mechanisms remain primitive. Evaluation (eval) is still the top infrastructure challenge. AI positively impacts job satisfaction and experimentation but also raises concerns about technical skill erosion and non-developers shipping code, fundamentally changing engineering culture. Predictions include a likely AGI declaration within five years and a shift away from Transformers as state-of-the-art.

Jul 20, 2026

In the Land of AI Agents, the Verifiers Are King — Tariq Shaukat, Sonar

This talk addresses the critical challenge of verification in AI agent development, moving beyond generation to ensure correctness. It highlights the problem of "AI slop" and the "productivity paradox" of AI coding agents, where initial velocity gains are offset by increased technical debt and quality issues. The speaker introduces the AC/DC (Agent-Centric Development Cycle) framework comprising three stages: Guide (providing context and constraints), Verify (zero-trust, multi-layered verification using both algorithmic and agentic methods), and Solve (active code maintenance to control technical debt). This systems-level approach, integrating verification across agentic, CI, and code maintenance loops, significantly reduces issues and transforms AI into a reliable enterprise asset.

Jul 20, 2026

Sandboxing, Agent Harnesses, and Agent Teamwork

Shahram Anver, CEO of Cleric, details how AI agents for SRE are evolving beyond fast triage to continuous learning and operational memory. He discusses Cleric's architectural shifts, from complex early designs to simpler, sandboxed query agents, and the unique challenges SRE agents face in diverse production environments. A core focus is on human-agent interaction, redefining roles as managers overseeing agents, and how agents learn from unstructured data like Slack to build robust, actionable knowledge for autonomous, self-healing infrastructure. The discussion also touches on the future of software, differentiating between durable systems and rapidly developed "skills" or "vibe-coded" solutions.

Jul 20, 2026

Why Your Agent Disagrees With Itself (And What To Do About It) - Diane Lin, Datadog

This session addresses the critical problem of AI agent inconsistency, particularly in LLMs, which leads to "flip-flops" in high-stakes domains like cybersecurity. It argues that this isn't a model failure but a signal of ambiguity in the "gray zone" near decision boundaries. The proposed solution involves using active learning to identify these ambiguous cases, followed by augmenting agents with semantic memory (explicit policies) and episodic memory (past similar cases) to clarify decisions, improve consistency, and adapt to customer-specific preferences without relying solely on expensive fine-tuning.

Jul 20, 2026

Enterprise Agents Have a Structure Problem - Ishita Daga, Tesla

Ishita Daga, a Senior ML Engineer at Tesla, explains why enterprise AI agents fail, highlighting that current fixes like larger models or more RAG are insufficient. She identifies ambiguity, staleness, and user preference as key structural problems. Daga proposes a solution built on semantic retrieval infrastructure: a hierarchical approach to knowledge sources, including a curated semantic layer and metadata graphs. She also details a robust context life cycle with live data sources and continuous feedback loops to combat staleness. The challenge of integrating individual preferences, requiring agents to reason over business concepts rather than raw schemas, is also discussed.