Dr. Vijoy Pandey of Cisco's Outshift incubator discusses his vision for a future where multi-agent human societies collaborate to solve major scientific and physical challenges. He introduces AGNTCY, an open-source project for the "Internet of Agents," designed to address the critical hurdles of agent interoperability and trust through a Zero Trust framework and Task-Based Access Control (T-BACK).
Ben Smith and James Beswick explore the evolution of modern software architecture, discussing the critical role of workflow services in managing distributed systems, the trade-offs between microservices and monoliths, and the power of plugin architectures.
Anthropic's Head of Pre-training, Nick Joseph, details the immense engineering and infrastructure challenges behind training frontier models like Claude. He covers the evolution from early-stage custom frameworks to debugging hardware at massive scale, balancing pre-training with RL, and the strategic importance of data quality and team composition.
Distributed systems researcher Brooklyn Zelenka introduces local-first computing, a new paradigm where apps run on user devices, synchronizing via CRDTs like Automerge. This approach offers offline functionality, low latency, and enhanced privacy, ideal for collaborative "cozy web" applications and democratizing development by simplifying the tech stack.
Preeti Somal from Temporal explains that as AI agents move to production, they face significant reliability and scalability challenges. She introduces Temporal as a platform to abstract away this complexity, allowing developers to build robust, stateful AI agents by focusing on business logic instead of infrastructure plumbing like retries and error handling.
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.