Speaker
Abstract
Every AI coding tool can generate code. Very few can generate the right code for your organization, because they’re missing context. They don’t know why your team chose Redis over DynamoDB, what the team decided in a Slack thread from two months ago about the auth migration, or which architectural patterns your principal engineers actually enforce in review.
This talk is a practitioner’s guide to building a context engine: the reasoning layer that continuously synthesizes organizational knowledge across disparate sources into unified, queryable understanding. I’ll walk through the problems you actually have to solve — reasoning across systems that don’t agree with each other, searching globally before you can reason, maintaining identity-scoped permissions so every user and agent only sees what they should, and personalizing results based on who’s asking and what they’re working on. These are the engineering challenges that make naive RAG fall short, drawn from real lessons building this at scale.
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QCon San Francisco 2026 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
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Monday 16 November
10:35 Pacific LM Sponsored Legacy vs. AI-Native Is the Wrong Question: Architecting the Modern Platform Payal Patel, Saiprasad Murali Engineering leaders modernizing operational platforms are often presented with a false binary: choose the control and reliability of established enterprise platforms or embrace AI-native tools optimized for speed, automation, and intelligent experiences. 11:45 Pacific LM Session Sponsored Session Details coming soon! 13:35 Pacific LM Sponsored Your Agents Lack Context: Here's How to Fix 'You're absolutely right!"' Brandon Waselnuk Developer Relations @Unblocked Every AI coding tool can generate code. Very few can generate the right code for your organization, because they’re missing context. 14:45 Pacific LM Sponsored Wait, You're Still Doing PRs? Lee Faus Founder & CEO @Atomic PRs were built for open source. A non-maintainer wanted to contribute, a maintainer needed a gate, and you opened the PR early so the two of you could work through the change together while it was still forming. That was the point. The PR was where the thinking happened.