Gareth Yoder of Vanguard describes modernizing a cash ledger handling up to 30 million calls per day by running data, producer, and consumer migrations in parallel. Key themes include exposing legacy code to AI through an MCP server, reducing a seven-day research cycle to fifteen minutes, reimagining rather than lifting and shifting, and maintaining observability throughout the migration.
Viren Baraiya, CTO of Orkes and original creator of Netflix Conductor, explains why production agents behave like applications built from microservices. He argues for splitting the work between a non-deterministic LLM that plans and a deterministic, durable harness that executes, with approval gates, idempotent steps, and recorded side effects. He frames agent harnesses as late-bound sagas and demos an SRE remediation agent whose plan is compiled into a Conductor workflow.
Robert-Jan Huijsman, Founding Engineer at Reboot.dev, outlines a pragmatic approach to developer productivity by tackling friction and non-determinism in both human collaboration and software development. He shares Reboot.dev's strategies, including async workstreams, full-stack typing, unit testing with AI, and foundational engineering principles like retries, durable execution, and strong consistency, to build reliable and efficient systems.