Ricky Doar, VP of Solutions at Cursor, shares best practices for leveraging AI in software development, focusing on effective problem decomposition, context management, and navigating both new and legacy codebases. He highlights common anti-patterns, such as over-reliance on AI, and offers strategies for debugging, model steerability, and building effective agent harnesses.
Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, shares the development philosophy behind the AI coding tool, emphasizing building for future models, leveraging latent user demand, and the surprising longevity of the terminal interface.
Roman Zhukov (Red Hat) and Damian Brady (GitHub) explore the evolving landscape of AI-assisted software development, discussing its impact on developer workflows, code quality, security, and the future of developer roles. They emphasize that while AI tools are powerful amplifiers, human oversight remains essential for quality, security, and legal compliance.
Harrison Chase, co-founder of LangChain, explains the evolution of AI agents from early, rigid scaffolding to modern, flexible "harnesses." He argues that "context engineering"—managing what an LLM sees—is the key to building effective long-horizon agents. Chase also explores how agent development differs from traditional software, highlighting the critical role of traces as the new source of truth and memory systems that enable agents to improve themselves over time.
Aishwarya Naresh Reganti and Kiriti Badam, with experience from OpenAI, Google, and Amazon, share a framework for building successful enterprise AI products. They detail why AI development differs from traditional software, emphasizing the challenges of non-determinism and the agency-control trade-off, and introduce their 'Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development' (CC/CD) lifecycle to build reliable, value-driven AI systems.
A deep dive into practical strategies for improving AI reasoning in code and structured tasks. The talk covers capturing richer user intent through examples, enabling collaborative interaction, and using automated inspection for iterative refinement, illustrated with real-world applications from Microsoft.