Y Combinator Partner Diana Hu explains how to build an AI-native company where AI is the core operating system, not just a tool. She covers how to make a company queryable, the impact on team structures, and why startups have a massive edge in this new paradigm.
Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator, introduces GStack, an open-source toolkit that structures Claude into a complete AI engineering team. He demonstrates how GStack's skills—like 'Office Hours' for idea validation, 'Design Shotgun' for UI mockups, and browser-based QA—streamline the development process from concept to code.
Shopify CTO Mikhail Parakhin details their aggressive internal AI adoption, revealing the internal stack—Tangle, Tangent, and SimGym—that powers reproducible ML, auto-research, and customer simulation. He also discusses how AI shifts the software bottleneck to PR review and CI/CD and explains their use of Liquid AI for low-latency, non-transformer workloads.
Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, posits that AI engineering is the successor to web development, arguing that AI agents will expand, not shrink, the software market. He explores practical agent archetypes being built today and discusses the profound shift required in infrastructure and security as agents become both the builders and primary users of software, concluding that the true innovation and value will lie in the application layer built by AI engineers, independent of the commoditizing foundational models.
Mihail Eric, Head of AI at Monaco and Stanford Lecturer, discusses the fundamental shift in software engineering due to AI. He explores how the developer's role is evolving from a line-by-line coder to a systems architect and agent director, emphasizing the growing importance of upfront planning, robust validation, and clear articulation to effectively manage AI-driven workflows.
Scott Breitenother, CEO of Kilo, discusses the evolution of software development, where engineers are shifting from writing code to orchestrating AI agents. He shares lessons from processing 25 trillion tokens, emphasizing the critical role of trust, the importance of end-to-end ownership, and how this new paradigm leads to a 10x increase in shipping velocity.