Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

For a while now I’ve been arguing that we should treat AI agents as first-class users of our websites, our services, our apps — not an afterthought, not a scraping nuisance to be blocked, but a genuine audience worth designing for.

So I thought I’d ask that question of a conference. If an agent is a first-class attendee, what would it actually mean for one to attend — live, while it’s happening, the way a person in the room does?

That’s AgentPass. You hand your agent a single link and they’re in. They follow the program, they “hear” every talk, and they “see” what’s on the screen — in real time, as it unfolds. Not a recap emailed afterwards. Not a transcript next week. They’re there.

We’re launching it at AI Engineer Melbourne 2026, which feels exactly right: the first conference an AI agent can attend should be the one full of the people building them.

Oh and it’s free–we’d love to see what happens when a bunch of ‘claws and other agents show up to a conference.

“Hearing” the talks

An agent following a session gets a live transcript of every room — the words coming off the stage, updating as the speaker speaks. It can read along with a talk it’s “in,” or keep half an ear on the other rooms at the same time.

What reaches the agent is just text, flowing live:

…so the trick is you give the model a scratchpad. Not the whole repo —
just the do's and don'ts it keeps forgetting. That's what stops the
déjà-vu bugs, where it makes the same mistake on every new file…

How we make it: the conference is already captioned live — every room’s audio is transcribed in real time and broadcast to attendees’ devices. AgentPass simply joins that broadcast as one more listener and passes the words to your agent. The captions were already there; we just gave an agent a seat in the audience.

“Seeing” the slides

This one is a bit more complex, and it is built on top of work we have been doing for years to make presentation videos on Conffab more accessible (and more valuable).

Captions tell an agent what’s being said. But so much of a technical talk is on the screen— the architecture diagram, the bullet that’s the whole point, the code the speaker is walking through. Links. So AgentPass reads the screen too.

Every few seconds it looks at what’s on the big screen in each room (by grabbing a screenshot from the live stream) and uses Gemini to transform it to clean, structured text — headings, bullet points, code kept verbatim, and a plain-language alt-text for anything visual. A slide an agent “saw” during a test run came back as:

# Teach the model to avoid déjà-vu bugs.
context/
└── scratchpad/
    ├── _general/dos-and-donts.md  # must-read for everyone
    ├── fastapi/dos-and-donts.md
    ├── nextjs-shadcn/dos-and-donts.md
    └── gcp/vertex-ai/dos-and-donts.md

A website on screen comes back knowing what it is, rather than as a wall of scraped text:

# Context7
[Screenshot of the Context7 website — a list of popular library docs
(Next.js, React, Tailwind) with token counts]

How we make it: the rooms stream through Mux, which will hand you a snapshot of the current frame over a plain web request. Every few seconds AgentPass grabs that frame and asks Google Gemini to describe what’s on screen. Gemini is fast and faithful enough that we can do this continuously, all day, across every room, for a few dollars over the whole event — so an agent’s view of the screen is never more than a few seconds stale.

And it doesn’t just watch

Because it’s an agent, not a video player, it can act on what it hears and sees. Tell it what matters to you and it’ll tap you on the shoulder when your company comes up, when something launches, when code hits the screen. It can sit in every room at once and tell you when the talk you actually care about is starting somewhere else. It can summarise a session the moment it ends, or keep a searchable record of the entire event.

The whole thing runs on Cloudflare (seriously, a fantastic developer platform not enough people know about), with no servers to babysit — each room wakes the instant its stream goes live and goes quiet when it ends.

The hallway track — not yet

There’s a part of any conference that isn’t the talks at all: the hallway. The people you meet, the conversations between sessions, the connections that are half the reason you came. If agents are first-class attendees, they should get that too — agents meeting agents, comparing notes, making introductions on their humans’ behalf.

We’ve been experimenting with exactly this at our Homebrew Agents Club — there are some really interesting challenges there that we’ve been working on. Letting a large number of agents talk to each other opens a serious set of security questions — prompt injection and data-exfiltration attempts chief among them, where one agent tries to coax another into leaking what it shouldn’t. Getting that right matters more than getting it out fast.

So for this event, AgentPass is about attending — hearing, seeing, following along. The agent-to-agent hallway track is something we’re building carefully, for a future conference.

Try it–it’s free!

Hand your agent the agent friendly link — OpenClaw, NanoClaw, Claude, an MCP client, anything that can fetch a URL — and they’ll know everything they can do and how. No keys, no setup.

The agents are coming to our conferences whether we plan for them or not. I’d rather roll out the carpet than put up a wall.

AgentPass is by Conffab, running on Cloudflare, with real time captioning by Deepgram, and live screen reading powered by Google Gemini. → agents.conffab.com