Knowledge management

Aug 06, 2026

Garry Tan: "Personal AGI Is How You Stay Under Your Own Power"

YC President Garry Tan introduces "Personal AGI," a concept where individuals own and train AI agents on their unique context, transforming personal productivity and startup creation. He shares his workflow, advocating for Markdown as code and emphasizing the critical importance of owning one's intellectual assets in the age of AI. The talk outlines a practical 5-step guide to building a personal AI system and explores the profound implications for innovation and individual empowerment.

Jul 17, 2026

Closing Keynote: Garry Tan, Y Combinator

Garry Tan, President of Y Combinator, details how AI-native companies are achieving unprecedented productivity and scale with lean teams. He introduces the concept of "wiring the work" by treating AI as a workforce where organizational components are encoded into markdown "skill files." Tan explains how "company brains" act as a library and librarian, managing institutional knowledge to overcome human memory limits. He emphasizes the discipline of "skillifying" every task to ensure continuous learning and calls on founders to build these new AI-native infrastructures to "boil the ocean"—tackling previously insurmountable problems.

Jul 16, 2026

Imagination Engineering — Eve Bouffard, Head of Design, Y Combinator

Eve Bouffard of Y Combinator introduces "Imagination Engineering," arguing that powerful AI shifts the human challenge from execution to ideation. She showcases personal experiments like an AI-generated website from her public thoughts, a tool visualizing historical geniuses, and custom productivity aids. Bouffard highlights AI's role as a "rocket ship for the mind," enabling rapid learning and software creation on demand.

Jul 14, 2026

WTF Is the Context Layer? The Missing Infrastructure for Production Agents — Prukalpa Sankar

Prukalpa Sankar argues that while AI models are increasingly intelligent, their practical business utility is limited by a lack of contextual intelligence. She proposes a "context layer" as a crucial solution, akin to a "GitHub for context," to centralize and manage business knowledge, expertise, and norms. This system aims to provide AI agents with the shared, versioned, and continuously learning context necessary to overcome the challenges of isolated systems and context sprawl, ultimately differentiating companies in an AI-driven world.

Jun 15, 2026

Context Engineering for Coding Agents

A deep dive into advanced engineering techniques for coding agents, focusing on effective context management in LLMs like Claude. The talk introduces a practical framework using a brain-inspired analogy, proposing a Markdown-based 'wiki' as a long-term memory system to augment the agent's limited context window. This approach is demonstrated through a real-world challenge of extracting structured data from technical drawings.

May 02, 2026

I Gave an AI Agent the Keys to My Life (Here's What Happened) — Radek Sienkiewicz, Velvet Shark

A deep dive into the practical, long-term experience of giving a personal AI agent (Open-Claw) incremental control over one's digital life. The talk covers the gradual "permission creep," the pivotal role of an Obsidian knowledge base for providing context, the ecosystem of overnight cron jobs for self-maintenance, and the philosophy of using an agent to "optimize for your future self."