Programme topic
Infrastructure
Production agents create new runtime problems: long-lived work, bursty concurrency, token cost and local or constrained inference. These talks focus on the systems and economics needed to operate them reliably at scale.
7 published talks
Talks about infrastructure
Your spaghetti code has an invoice now: what complexity does to coding agents
Artem YakimenkoEngineering Director, Site Reliability, Culture Amp
We've told engineers for decades that high complexity makes code harder for humans to reason about. It turns out it makes code measurably more expensive for agents too. Unlike human frustration, this shows up directly on your API bill. I show and discuss my…
The Elephant and the Goldfish: Architecture Patterns for Cutting 70% of Agent Token Costs in Production
Tanya DixitForward Deployed Engineer, Google
LLM providers sell you a 2-million-token context window like an elephant that never forgets. If you actually build production agents that way, your latency explodes, your retrieval drifts, and your CFO will shut you down in 90 days. In production, the best…
Office-Brain and the Night Shift: What Happens When You Turn Off the Meter
Mark PesceCo-Founder, Noops
"Good enough" AI now runs on a reasonably beefy laptop. Qwen3.8-27B benchmarks at an Intelligence Index of 52 - roughly the best money could buy back in February - and inferences happily on consumer kit. When tokens are minted on your own machines, the meter…
Running 100K+ Concurrent Agents: It's Never the Prompt
Harry NguyenAI engineer, insightfactory.ai
Your Agents Aren't Failing at Prompting Every agent demo works. Then you run ten thousand at once, and the failures have nothing to do with the model: dead tuples piling up, a sync HTTP client freezing the event loop, requests hanging forever with no total…
Don't stop, won't stop. Automated verification of long-running agentic loops
AJ FisherVP Digital Science, Tetratherix
Long-running agentic loops create different engineering problems than code generation. Once agents work unattended for many hours, iterate through 20 or more review cycles, and build stacked PRs towards a larger goal, the challenge changes to keeping that…
Token usage is the new lines of code (and it's just as useless)
Fawaz AhmadSenior Engineering Director, Canva
Canva hit mid-2026 with every AI metric a vendor could hand us and no answer to the only question the business actually cared about: is this working? Adoption flattened at around 85% of ~3,000 engineers, and the number stopped telling us anything. AI touched…
We Deleted Most of Our Agents. Everything Got Faster
Khang Nguyen HoangData Scientist, Hello Clever
The default advice is to add agents: specialised roles, an orchestrator, handoffs between them. We built that. It was a genuinely useful way to explore the problem space, and under real production traffic it was slow and expensive. When an agent system is…