Oct 19, 2026

The Model Swap Workshop: GPT-5.5 vs Kimi vs DeepSeek vs Mistral

Pamela Fox runs a guided workshop comparing GPT-5.5, Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and Mistral Large 3 on Microsoft Foundry, showing that benchmarks cannot predict how a model will behave in a specific application. The talk covers counting, RAG groundedness, vision, multilingual failures, tool calling, parallel tool calls in agents, string-check and LLM-as-a-judge evals, Microsoft's ASSERT tool for generating test sets, and DSPy prompt optimization that lets a cheap model satisfy a spec.

Sep 17, 2026

Building the Safety Layer for AI Agents

Raindrop is building the safety layer for AI agents, detecting and preventing production failures like hallucinations and failed tool calls. The company addresses the paradox that as agents become more capable, they introduce greater complexity and more ways for things to go wrong. Their new Raindrop Simulations product catches critical failures in CI before they ever reach production, democratizing a capability previously limited to large AI labs.

Sep 15, 2026

Realtime Voice Agents with Frontier Intelligence — Bohan Li, EliseAI

Bohan Li of EliseAI unveils a sophisticated architecture for real-time voice agents that merges high intelligence with low latency, akin to a self-driving car's perception, planning, and control systems. Key innovations include a speculative transcriber combining fast streaming with accurate contextual correction, background agents for offloading LLM tool calls and enabling eager generation, and a clever prefix cache for speech synthesis that seamlessly blends pre-cached audio with dynamically generated speech to mask underlying processing delays.

Aug 17, 2026

MCP Goes Stateless | ​John Dellenbaugh & Pankaj Kumar | MCP Release Party - Seattle

This session details the transformation of the MCP protocol to a stateless design, addressing previous scaling challenges by externalizing session state to a database and eliminating the need for sticky sessions and complex infrastructure. The presentation includes a live demo comparing stateful and stateless architectures, highlighting benefits in scalability and simplified deployment. It also covers considerations for security and data resiliency within this new paradigm.

Jul 08, 2026

Building an ACP-Compatible Agent Live — Bennet Fenner, Zed

This session explores building an AI coding agent that integrates with the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), Zed's open-source JSON RPC-based standard for agent-client communication. It covers essential architectural elements, including protocol design, session lifecycle management, real-time streaming of model output via session updates, and sophisticated handling of tool calls, such as proxied file system operations and self-modifying code for new capabilities like a terminal tool.

May 20, 2026

Building MCP Before MCP Existed: Inside Despegar's Sofia Agent

A deep dive into Despegar's GenAI travel agent, Sofia. Explore its multi-agent architecture, the custom orchestration layer 'Chappi' built before MCP was a standard, and the strategy of decentralizing agent development across company squads to cover the entire five-phase travel arc.