Jul 20, 2026

In the Land of AI Agents, the Verifiers Are King — Tariq Shaukat, Sonar

This talk addresses the critical challenge of verification in AI agent development, moving beyond generation to ensure correctness. It highlights the problem of "AI slop" and the "productivity paradox" of AI coding agents, where initial velocity gains are offset by increased technical debt and quality issues. The speaker introduces the AC/DC (Agent-Centric Development Cycle) framework comprising three stages: Guide (providing context and constraints), Verify (zero-trust, multi-layered verification using both algorithmic and agentic methods), and Solve (active code maintenance to control technical debt). This systems-level approach, integrating verification across agentic, CI, and code maintenance loops, significantly reduces issues and transforms AI into a reliable enterprise asset.

Jul 07, 2026

SWE-Marathon: Evaluating Coding Agents at Billion-Token Scale - Rishi Desai, Abundant AI

SWE-Marathon introduces a benchmark for long-horizon autonomous software engineering, pushing coding agents from bug fixes to full project ownership. It highlights the critical need for robust, multi-layered verification and anti-cheat mechanisms to prevent reward hacking in tasks spanning hundreds of millions of tokens, revealing that current agents achieve only a 26% success rate.

Jun 30, 2026

Session on Reasoning

This session features two talks on optimizing and verifying AI reasoning. Hongxiang Fan discusses cross-stack co-design for efficient AI, focusing on Test-Time Scaling (TTS) challenges, optimal verification granularity, and system-level optimizations for edge deployments. Nagarajan Natarajan introduces 'Advancing Verified Reasoning' with the InterVent platform, aiming to ensure AI agents comply with complex policies through formal verification, dynamic steering, and leveraging verification signals for training. Both emphasize addressing the computational and reliability costs of advanced AI.

Apr 07, 2026

AI Won't Take Your Job—It Will Make You the CEO | The a16z Show

Balaji Srinivasan discusses the paradoxical nature of AI, which lowers creation costs while simultaneously raising verification costs. He argues this tension pushes society toward a "trusted tribe" model, similar to the Chinese internet, where AI excels within high-trust groups but struggles between them. The conversation covers why physical tasks are easier to automate than digital ones, how AI makes everyone a CEO rather than obsolete, and why crypto, particularly Zcash, serves as a necessary counterbalance for inter-tribe transactions in an AI-driven world.

Mar 10, 2026

Physics Gets a Vote: Nominal Cofounders on Hardware Development in an AI World

Nominal's co-founders discuss the new age of reindustrialization and the critical need for a modern data infrastructure in hardware engineering. They explain how their platform acts as a 'GitHub for hardware data,' providing a system of record for testing that bridges the gap between simulation and reality, and serves as the essential verification layer for the future of 'Physical AI'.

Dec 22, 2025

Making Codebases Agent Ready – Eno Reyes, Factory AI

The effectiveness of AI coding agents is not limited by model quality, but by "Agent Readiness"—the state of your development environment. This talk explains why agents fail on codebases with flaky tests, low validation, and tribal knowledge. It introduces a framework for improving your environment's readiness through rigorous verification, automated validation, and a shift to specification-driven development, arguing this is the key to unlocking 5-7x productivity gains and enabling true software engineering autonomy.