# Infrastructure — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

> 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.

Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/topics/infrastructure-operations/
Program status: The speaker lineup and talk descriptions are public. Session days, times, rooms and the full timetable have not yet been published.

## Published talks

- [Your spaghetti code has an invoice now: what complexity does to coding agents](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/artem-yakimenko/) — Artem Yakimenko
  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 research based around a series of controlled benchmarks on the same codebase with different levels of…
- [The Elephant and the Goldfish: Architecture Patterns for Cutting 70% of Agent Token Costs in Production](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/tanya-dixit/) — Tanya Dixit
  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 agents think like elephants, but operate like goldfish. Details: While frontier models offer…
- [Office-Brain and the Night Shift: What Happens When You Turn Off the Meter](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/mark-pesce/) — Mark Pesce
  "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 goes away, and a different way of working becomes economic: batch processing returns. I call it the…
- [Running 100K+ Concurrent Agents: It's Never the Prompt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/harry-nguyen/) — Harry Nguyen
  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 timeout. This talk is a look inside how we build and run agents at massive scale in production. It…
- [Don't stop, won't stop. Automated verification of long-running agentic loops](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/aj-fisher/) — AJ Fisher
  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 activity aligned, verifiable and useful. This talk looks at the verification systems built around…
- [Token usage is the new lines of code (and it's just as useless)](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/fawaz-ahmad/) — Fawaz Ahmad
  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 43% of PRs, PR volume was up 44% year over year (and growing week-over-week), but none of us could…
- [We Deleted Most of Our Agents. Everything Got Faster](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/khang-nguyen-hoang/) — Khang Nguyen Hoang
  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 slow, the instinct is to reach for a faster model. That was the wrong lever. Our latency wasn't…

The timetable is not public. This page does not imply a day, time, room or track.

- [Explore the whole programme](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/program/)
- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)