Your Agents Lack Context: Here's How to Fix 'You're absolutely right!"'

QCon San Francisco 2026

Sponsored session

Your Agents Lack Context: Here's How to Fix 'You're absolutely right!"'

Monday Nov 16 / 01:35PM PST, Pacific LM at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

Register

$2,955, Conference (3 days)
Current pricing ends October 13th

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.

Sponsored session

Session sponsored by

Your developers know how to write code. What slows them down is the missing context to know what code to write. Unblocked gives engineering teams the answers they need to get their jobs done – without having to wait on or interrupt their teammates.

Register

$2,955, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends October 13th. All pass options.

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

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.

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Current pricing ends October 13th
$2,955, Conference (3 days)

Register