Autonomous agents

Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe

Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe

This talk addresses the challenge of enabling AI agents to spend money autonomously and safely. Steve Kaliski from Stripe presents a framework for separating non-deterministic discovery from deterministic transactions. He introduces three key components of Stripe's solution: Shared Payment Tokens for secure credential sharing with enforced spending limits, the Machine Payments Protocol for paying for API tool calls, and the Agent to Commerce Protocol (ACP) for structured, API-driven e-commerce checkouts. Through code examples, the talk demonstrates how these primitives create a secure and auditable payment infrastructure for the emerging autonomous economy.

How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI

How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI

YC General Partner Tom Blomfield explains how to move beyond the traditional hierarchical company structure and build a self-improving organization using AI. He introduces the concept of recursive, self-improving AI loops that can optimize a company's operations, products, and knowledge base while the founders sleep.

Build Agents That Run for Hours (Without Losing the Plot) — Ash Prabaker & Andrew Wilson, Anthropic

Build Agents That Run for Hours (Without Losing the Plot) — Ash Prabaker & Andrew Wilson, Anthropic

Explore advanced techniques for building long-running AI agents, moving beyond simple loops. Learn why self-evaluation fails and adversarial evaluators succeed, how to manage context with structured handoffs instead of just compaction, and how to use negotiated 'sprint contracts' and detailed rubrics to build and test complex, full-stack applications autonomously.

LLM codegen fails and how to stop 'em — Danilo Campos, PostHog

LLM codegen fails and how to stop 'em — Danilo Campos, PostHog

Danilo Campos of PostHog details the common failure modes of LLM-based code generation—from model rot to security risks—and shares the practical, prose-driven strategies his team uses to make their autonomous coding agent reliable for thousands of users.

Building your own software factory — Eric Zakariasson, Cursor

Building your own software factory — Eric Zakariasson, Cursor

Eric Zakariasson from Cursor explains the shift from single-agent pair programming to managing a multi-agent "software factory". He outlines the practical steps required, from establishing a well-structured codebase with guardrails to adopting a managerial mindset that focuses on automation, asynchronous work, and scaling agent fleets to increase software development throughput and consistency.

[FULL WORKSHOP] AI Coding For Real Engineers - Matt Pocock, AI Hero (@mattpocockuk )

[FULL WORKSHOP] AI Coding For Real Engineers - Matt Pocock, AI Hero (@mattpocockuk )

A workshop on building a complete AI-assisted development workflow, covering how to translate ambiguous requirements into agent-ready plans and run autonomous coding agents to ship production-ready features.