Maggie Appleton from GitHub Next argues that current agentic tools are flawed by focusing on individual productivity, ignoring the collaborative nature of software development. She introduces ACE (Agent Collaboration Environment), a multiplayer platform designed to solve team alignment issues by integrating planning, development, and shared context in a real-time, sandboxed environment.
Replit co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad discusses the company's 10-year journey from a browser IDE to an AI-native "vibe coding" platform, empowering non-technical domain experts to build and deploy real software, and what the future holds with parallel agents and a post-prompting world.
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.