Oct 06, 2026

The 6 Pillars of an Agentic Harness for Production — Varun Krovvidi, Resolve AI

Varun Krovvidi of Resolve AI explains why AI excels at code generation but struggles with the complex, multi-domain problem of running and fixing software in production. He outlines five common failure modes for AI agents in production (anchoring bias, context issues, coherent vs. causal answers, guardrails, lack of learning) and introduces Resolve AI's six-pillar architecture: model orchestration, context engineering, causal reasoning, governed actions, learning systems, and multi-level evaluations. A demo illustrates how Resolve AI diagnoses a Grafana alert to its root cause, ruling out coincidental events and maintaining its causal reasoning.

Oct 06, 2026

What Is an Inference Engine, Anyway? — Charles Frye, Modal

Charles Frye explains the architecture, performance engineering, and operational challenges of LLM inference engines. He dissects workload types, core components like schedulers and kernel backends, and advanced techniques such as KV caching, CUDA graphs, and speculative decoding, concluding with essential strategies for observability and debugging in production environments.

Oct 05, 2026

Your AI Agent Is Confidently Wrong About Production — Willem Pienaar, Cleric

Willem Pienaar, CTO of Cleric, details why AI agents struggle with production debugging compared to code generation. He explains the unique challenges of dynamic, unverified production environments and LLMs' inherent confidence bias. Pienaar outlines four common agent failure modes (symptom/cause confusion, missing baselines, abstraction loss, anchoring) and introduces grounding techniques—like generating multiple theories, using baselines and dependency graphs, temporal analysis, and evidence propagation—to enhance diagnostic accuracy. He also emphasizes the critical need for verifying fixes against real outcomes to calibrate agent confidence, ultimately aiming to bring production signals into the development environment for proactive failure prediction.

Oct 05, 2026

Agentic Search vs Vector Search for Coding Agents: We Ran the Eval — Braintrust

This talk by Jess Wang from Braintrust delves into the critical importance of evaluations (evals) in AI development, moving beyond subjective "vibes" to data-driven decision-making. She breaks down the four core components of an eval—dataset, task, scoring, and experiments—and illustrates the continuous improvement "eval flywheel" integrating observability. The central experiment compares agentic search against vector search for a coding agent tasked with finding buggy code in Microsoft's TypeScript Go repo. While both methods achieved identical accuracy, vector search proved four times more expensive due to its inability to capture surrounding context within code chunks, leading to excessive, inefficient searches. Wang concludes with practical caveats and best practices for conducting effective LLM evals.

Oct 02, 2026

The 5 Levels of Self-Driving Production — Eric Schwartz, Traversal

Eric Schwartz, a product manager at Traversal, argues that AI-generated code has moved engineering time from building to troubleshooting, and that observability dashboards show what broke but not why. He frames root cause analysis as a causal problem, lays out five levels of self-driving production, walks through alert intelligence at PepsiCo and incident response at American Express, and offers five questions for evaluating an AI SRE.

Sep 20, 2026

When Should AI Systems Use Super Agents?

Grant Miller explains the paradox of "super agents" in AI systems – their immense power comes with significant risks. He details concerns like privilege abuse and expanded attack surfaces, contrasting them with the benefits of unified organizational intelligence and workflow coordination. The solution proposed is an architecture of "agent swarms," guided by principles of least agency, isolation, observability, and human oversight, to build secure and scalable agentic systems.