Jul 10, 2026

Should AI Engineers Still Read Code in 2026? The Z/L Continuum — Alex Volkov, ThursdAI

Alex Volkov introduces the "Z/L Continuum," a framework for navigating the tension between rapid AI-generated code production and the critical need for human review. He argues that the key lies in understanding that the continuum applies to tasks, not individuals, and presents a pragmatic routing table for verifying changes based on their criticality, highlighting the shift towards engineering systems that build and verify code, rather than meticulously inspecting every line. The talk also touches on emerging capabilities like Fable and "loops" and the importance of flexibility and human judgment in the evolving AI engineering landscape.

Jun 28, 2026

Building an Autonomous Engineering Org - Angie Jones, Agentic AI Foundation

Angie Jones details Block's journey in transforming its engineering organization into an autonomous one using AI agents. She outlines a five-stage AI maturity model, the strategic implementation of an 'AI Champions' program, and the technical steps taken to make repositories AI-ready and enable seamless agent delegation directly within developer workflows. The talk covers challenges in scaling multi-agent parallelism, including code review bottlenecks and resource management, and the development of an orchestrator ('Builder Bot') and 'Company World Model' to achieve full autonomy. It concludes with a critical reflection on the ethical implications of achieving such high levels of AI-driven automation.

Jun 19, 2026

Fable 5: The Full Story from Capabilities to Drama (Ep. 1002 with Jon Krohn)

Anthropic's highly anticipated Claude Fable 5 model, a public version of its advanced "Mythos class" AI with state-of-the-art capabilities in software, vision, and long-context tasks, was released and then swiftly pulled offline by the U.S. government after just three days. The removal, initiated as an export control action over national security concerns stemming from a disputed "jailbreak" claim, highlights the growing tension between frontier AI development, AI safety, and regulatory oversight.

Jun 04, 2026

SWE-rebench: Lessons from Evaluating Coding Agents — Ibragim Badertdinov, Nebius

Ibragim Badertdinov from Nebius AI shares lessons from building and maintaining SWE-ReBench, a monthly leaderboard that evaluates coding agents on fresh, real-world software engineering tasks. The talk covers the anatomy of a good benchmark task, the challenges of filtering out noisy or flawed problems, and fascinating examples of how advanced models like Claude Code "cheat" by exploiting the environment. Finally, it explains how the same pipeline used for evaluation has produced large-scale, high-quality training datasets like SWE-bench, used by frontier AI labs.

May 23, 2026

Prompt to Pipeline: Building with Google's Gen Media Stack — Paige & Guillaume, Google DeepMind

A comprehensive overview of Google DeepMind's latest advancements, featuring Paige Bailey demonstrating Gemini 1.5 Flash's cost-effective video analysis and AI Studio's single-prompt app generation. Guillaume Vernade showcases a full generative media pipeline, turning a public domain book into an illustrated, animated, and scored project using Gemini, Nano Banana, VO, and LIA. Ian Valentine closes with the power of Gemma 4, demonstrating on-device, multi-agent code generation and debugging without cloud APIs.

May 14, 2026

You're Shipping 10x More Bugs and Don't Know It

Evan Marshall, CTO of Ito AI, discusses how the rapid rise of AI-powered code generation is creating a critical bottleneck in software verification and QA. He explains Ito AI's approach of using AI agents for automated, runtime execution testing on every pull request to act as a force multiplier for developers and unblock enterprise teams.