Shawn Wang coined the term "AI Engineer" with his seminal 2023 essay "The Rise of the AI Engineer."

Few people are better placed to help us keep pace with a field that seems…

Token pricing is a noisy headline. What matters in production is what you pay per task once outputs get longer, retries creep in, and “good enough” models get deprecated.

This talk breaks down the current dynamics…

Software development as we knew it is dead. The old world of hand-crafting every line, endless hiring cycles, and fragile vertical stacks has been overtaken by AI-driven software factories that turn simple prompts into…

Full-duplex voice agents punish the choices text-only agents forgive. A 50ms GC pause is a perceptible glitch. A blocked event loop is a barged-in user talking over your model. Google’s Python ADK is a beautiful kit for…

Every AI engineer knows the loop — prompt tweaks, evals, regressions, repeat. It feels like going in circles. But that's not the problem. The problem is not knowing if each circle is tighter than the last. This talk is…

The smartest model doesn't always win.

In agentic coding loops, a model that is 10x faster but only marginally competent can often fail its way to success before a frontier model finishes reasoning.

AJ Fisher…

Responsible AI isn’t culturally neutral. American AI development embeds distinctly American values — individual liberty, technological solutionism, and winner-takes-all competition. But what happens when these values…

The 2025–2026 wave of "self-evolving" agents — prompt-tuning loops, memory accumulation, agent swarms, GEPA, ReasoningBank — share a structure that is sometimes lost in the jargon: every one of them is hill-climbing on…

Generative AI systems evolve constantly, and the impact of prompt or model changes often isn't clear until real users interact with them in production. In this session, learn how teams using Amazon Bedrock safely…

Most AI agents are reactive chatbots—great for one-off queries, but they reset, forget, and lack initiative, failing in real-world use like personal assistants or autonomous workflows.

This talk dives into the…

CI infrastructure is ripe for the vibing — so why don’t we? I have been.

Our company must deliver 200 interactive science and maths games for millions of students this year. Only a few years ago were we making 30, by…

As AI moves from "chat" to "act," the risk surface is exploding. Traditional governance is too slow, too onerous, and often looks in the wrong places. Join this session to learn how to:

- Identify the 3 fatal flaws…

Most “AI gives you 10x productivity” stories assume coding is the bottleneck. For large and mature companies this is almost never the case, so you roll out AI coding tools, people feel faster, but delivery metrics…

In this talk, we will share how we built a platform at Notion that allows developers to extend AI agents with custom code. The system enables developers to write small programs that give their agents access to tools…

Jake Maloney is the founder of AI Jobs Australia, a job board dedicated to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science, and AI-adjacent emerging roles. That vantage point gives him insight into the…

Can you faithfully edit hand-drawn illustrations using an image model you haven’t fine-tuned? Most practitioners assume you need a LoRA for style-faithful editing. I set out to prove otherwise — building a production…

Every engineering team trying to automate developer workflows with AI agents hits the same wall: the iteration tax. You ask an agent to review a PR, scaffold a feature, or audit code quality — it does something almost…

Everyone wants privacy, but the best models require you to give up control of your data. What options are there for keeping data private but while still embracing the promise of AI?

In this talk we'll take a…

Every time you've told an agent it broke the layout of your website, output the wrong schema or failed an invariant - you are the feedback loop. The teams achieving the best outcomes right now are focused on building…

Software engineering has a pattern: demanding practices arrive and get reduced to their ceremonies. Agile kept the standups, lost the discipline. DevOps kept the postmortems, lost the learning. The form survives. The…

Multi-agent systems promise scalability and smarter reasoning—but in production, more agents often mean more cost, latency, and failure. This talk shares real-world engineering lessons, metrics, and architectural…

How a team of fewer than 15 engineers at MYOB took an AI-powered chat experience from zero to production, embedded directly inside the product serving real small business owners and accountants. Leaning heavily into…

A moderated conversation closing the Governance & Ethics session. Andrew Murphy leads a discussion with Aubrey Blanche, Hamish Songsmith, and Nick Lothian on how principles, operational frameworks, and hands-on privacy…

Your multi-agent system probably has one orchestrator with access to every tool, every database, every API. If that agent gets injected, the entire toolchain is compromised. Guardrails won't save you. In this session,…

A/B testing is too rigid a tool for AI systems. You're stuck serving worse results for the duration of the experiment and getting billed for slower models while three providers release SOTA updates this week.

Steal a…

Agent usage is exploding (if you haven't noticed) with an unprecedented transformation in the activities of both developers and other roles creating enormous volumes of new autonomous, dynamic decision making programs…

Over the last two years, our customer web traffic changed: today around 50% of visitors were unknown browsers and AI agents. The era of aligning with the traditional search engine crawlers with Core Web Vitals is…

Regulatory AI represents the next evolution of financial systems, where compliance, risk, and governance are no longer external constraints, but embedded, intelligent capabilities within the platform itself.

This…

We shipped one of REA Group’s first generative AI features to production: Property Highlights, which turns long real-estate listings into three skimmable takeaways. The demo was easy; real traffic wasn’t—hallucinations…

We've spent a decade codifying infrastructure, Terraform, Pulumi, CDK. This session explores what happens when you treat infrastructure as a queryable data layer: exposing cloud state, Skills giving agents reusable…

Balram Singh is a frontend-focused full-stack engineer and architect with over a decade of experience building web and mobile applications. He currently works at Publicis Sapient in Australia, delivering large-scale…

StackQL provides a unified control plane data model for agents, tools, processes and humans to interact with. The StackQL MCP server exposes this unified interface to AI agents, allowing them to query, provision, and…

Most enterprise AI agent projects stall between POC and production because teams can't answer a basic question: is the agent actually performing as expected? This talk shares the practical framework we've developed with…

In the pre-genAI era, vertical product teams handed insights to a separate R&D group, who shipped a new model two quarters later. That handoff is now a bug. Agentic systems are built from dozens of model calls, judges,…

Explore the engineering breakthroughs behind running state-of-the-art, ultra-large Mixture-of-Experts models (100B-600B+ parameters) entirely offline on consumer-grade desktop hardware. This session dives deep into our…

Most developers pick their AI model the same way: use the biggest, smartest one available for everything. Bash script? Opus. Dockerfile? Whatever's at the top of the dropdown. Then they hit their usage limits halfway…

Every API you've shipped was designed for a human reading docs. Agents don't read docs - they load your entire tool schema into a context window every call, then burn tokens guessing which endpoint to try.

Take a…

Inga Pflaumer shares how a pre-seed startup without technical leadership was able to quickly build and iterate on their product using AI without sacrificing safety, focusing on setting up the right foundations and…

Large language models excel at code—but engineering isn't just code. When you ask an AI to calculate short-circuit currents per IEC 60909 or size a pavement per Austroads 2022, you're asking it to operate outside its…

Your pipeline breaks at 2am. Nobody's watching. By morning, it's already fixed.
That's not wishful thinking — that's agentic self-healing in production.
In this talk, we'll explore how AI agents can monitor, diagnose,…

A moderated conversation closing the L2 Case Studies session. AJ Fisher leads a discussion with Theo Adis, Balram Singh, and Inga Pflaumer about what it really took to ship AI into live businesses across regulated…

Flue is a programmable, open source agent harness, able to represent any autonomous agent or workflow, from simple chatbots to entire coding platforms.

In this talk we'll will touch on…

At Canva, our support experience is powered by multiple AI systems, from real-time assistance to asynchronous ticket resolution that handles complex, multi-step workflows and escalates to humans when needed. In this…

You feel more productive than you’ve ever been. You put on the Iron Man suit and now you’re building things in hours that used to take weeks. And you’re exhausted by Wednesday. The craft that used to sustain you — the…

An analysis of the leading AI models and the real trade-offs between them across intelligence, speed, price, token usage, and beyond, grounded in Artificial Analysis' independent benchmarking. Includes a forward-looking…

Notion's Developer Platform gives developers and coding agents the building blocks to programmatically build on Notion. Connect to external systems, bring context into a shared workspace, and take permissioned actions…

AI demos are easy. Production systems are not.

In this session, we move beyond hype and explore what it actually takes to deliver AI systems that work in the real world. Not experiments. Not playgrounds. Proper,…

I got frustrated. My support tickets kept getting routed to the wrong team. Every misroute added a day to resolution. I decided to fix it.

The obvious approach in 2024 was to throw the problem at an LLM. I knew that…

Shipping an LLM app is easy. Knowing whether it's actually working is hard. Unlike traditional software, LLM systems and agentic pipelines can run without errors while producing wrong or degraded answers — and with…

Large AI models often struggle to meet the latency, memory, and power constraints required for real-world edge deployments. This talk explores practical techniques for making modern AI models efficient enough to run…

Large language models are often the default choice for production AI systems, even when the task does not require broad reasoning or generative depth. In this talk, I will share a real production case where an LLM-based…

In the time it takes to train a frontier model, the open source libraries we rely on can undergo significant changes. This creates an ongoing delta between what an LLM coding agent suggests and what the best practices…

AI tools feel productive. That's the problem.
A 2025 METR study found experienced developers were 19% slower using AI on their own codebases, yet believed they were 20% faster. I didn't need a study to tell me…

AGENTS.md started as a simple way to guide coding agents, but many teams are discovering that a default or poorly written one can actually make agents worse. Obvious facts, vague rules, outdated guidance, and generic…

We built Claudish, a free open-source proxy that lets Claude Code work with any AI model. 15+ providers directly - Google, OpenAI, xAI, Kimi, MiniMax, and more. OpenRouter for even wider access. Or fully offline with…

AI coding tools are rewriting what it means to build software, turning engineers into architects, reviewers, and orchestrators of AI-generated code rather than authors of every line. This talk explores the emerging…

When you roll out AI coding tools, you expect pushback about job security and workflow disruption. What you get instead is something harder to fix: senior engineers watching AI produce in seconds what used to take them…

Despite all the hype and promise, we are in the Timeshare Mainframe moment of AI. Even our devices rely on the cloud for most inference. As AI moves beyond the cloud and into the physical world, the real opportunity…

In 2024 my team built 2 web-based Interactives for our Science Curriculum. In 2025 we built 50, in 2026 we expect to build over 100. In 2024 Engineers collaborated with Writers to build Interactives. In 2025 Writers…

The fastest way to become irrelevant is to keep doing the job exactly as it was defined last year. AI hasn't removed the engineer from the loop; it has changed which loop is worth owning. This talk is about the new…

Modernization planning stalls when the business rules are locked inside decades of COBOL code. This talk shares a practical, production‑tested playbook I used to extract those rules, make them explainable, and serve…

For decades, documentation has been the "sacred bridge" between human intent and machine execution. Historically, this was born of necessity: when computer time was scarce, we had to document our plans perfectly before…

Move fast. Follow the vibe. Launch it.

That works… until you’re building a dating app.

Based on real world experiments building AI driven dating and community tools, this talk breaks down what actually happens…

A moderated conversation closing the L3 Engineering Reality session. AJ Fisher leads a discussion with Dave Hall, Krishna Mundada, and Andy Kelk on when not to reach for an LLM, the real costs of AI in production, and…

Legacy Software powers the world - from banking to utilities and government. The hardest part isn’t the code - we have the code.... it’s when the old guy with the beard leaves, and the knowledge walks out with him: what…

Every had a great idea for a video game but developing it always felt out of reach? AI is at a point now, where you can develop fully-fledged, multiplayer online games without needing to code. I'll take you through my…

For a long time, the world has run on systems built on logic. You put something in, follow a set of rules, and you get an output. Now we have systems that can run on inference: systems that can update belief, decide,…

The demand for AI agents that take real action is immense. However, developers keep hitting a frustrating bottleneck: building the complex authorisation logic required to let agents act on behalf of users. Rebuilding…

Project Electrification is an agentic, AI-powered application security pipeline designed to eliminate vulnerabilities at their source.
Autonomous agents scan large codebases, generate and execute custom SAST rules, and…

Prompt injection isn't a bug - it's a feature. LLMs trained on humanity's written corpus learned something we didn't intend: narrative structure. They understand dramatic tension, plot twists, and persuasive framing.…

Everyone talks about AI transformation. Almost no one talks about what happens when you survey your workforce and discover that executives and employees have completely different ideas about what AI readiness means - or…

AI is already in production—but almost no one has tested how it breaks. Today I’ll show you how attackers think, how models are actually exploited—from prompt injection to data exfiltration—and how to systematically…

Cloud outages used to mean your site went down, maybe you couldn't deploy. Just small unimportant stuff. Now an outage means you can't even write any code. And unreliable connections cause the same problems as ever -…

Most AI transformation stories focus on tooling, targets, and adoption curves. At Culture Amp, our primary focus was people and culture. We still wanted to drive and accelerate our impact, but we weren’t willing to…

When I joined my current team, it was a familiar pattern: 6-8 experiments over a year, each taking 10-12 weeks, 60-70% of the time burned on infrastructure, one thing in production held together with duct tape, and our…

De-identifying text is easy to demo and surprisingly hard to ship. This talk is a deep technical case study of building SmartScrub, a reversible de-identification system designed for legal workflows, where privacy…

Autocomplete is so 2023. Chatbots were already tedious by 2024. Running agents locally was cool... back in early 2025.

The future of engineering doesn't have a human in the coding loop at all.

When it's within…

AI tools are an amplifier. They don't just amplify productivity, they amplify whatever dynamics already exist in a team.

Steve Yegge calls it the Dracula Effect: AI coding at full speed is vampiric, draining…

Are the AI agents you're developing truly secure?

AI agents that execute actions autonomously offer unprecedented value. But what about the "privileges" granted to them to act "on behalf of the user"?

Improper…

You add memory to your agent, it works great in testing, and you ship it. A few weeks later, outputs start getting worse and nobody can figure out why. The agent is pulling in old information that's no longer true,…

Three things matter for AI coding effectiveness: the tool, the codebase, the developer. When we look at the nuance of sessions, we can see patterns across all these - what works, what doesn't, what you can control, what…

A moderated conversation closing the L4 Culture & People session — and closing the Leadership track. Andrew Murphy leads a discussion with Dr Christian Dandre, Eric Grigson and Paul Hughes (Culture Amp), and Navin…

AI agents aren’t magic. They’re distributed systems — with better marketing.

Behind every impressive demo is a messy reality: multiple tools, remote services, auth boundaries, latency, retries, side effects, and…

Your feed is full of warnings about an incoming tidal wave of AI slop. Unmaintainable code. Crushing tech debt. Anyone with a prompt and ten minutes shipping production code. The fear is real, but it misses what's…