AI
How Airbnb Guardrailed Its AI Customer Support Agent
Monday Nov 16 / 11:45AM PST
When Airbnb launched its AI customer support assistant, the feature made the news — the guardrails built to make it safe to ship did not. Yet an AI agent that talks to millions of customers, remembers a conversation across turns, and can trigger account actions is a
Weiping Peng
Distinguished Engineer @Airbnb, Previously Principal Architect @Salesforce for AI platform
Adapt or Drift: Resilience Engineering When AI Moves the Operating Point
Monday Nov 16 / 11:45AM PST
Resilient systems do not stay resilient by standing still. They survive by adapting. But adaptation comes with risk: under sustained pressure, organizations and systems can slowly drift toward failure while still appearing to operate normally.
Andrew Hatch
Engineering Leader and SRE Manager @Cisco ThousandEyes, With 25+ Years Building Software, Operations, SRE, and Platform Teams Across Australia, India, and the United States
Use AI to Multiply Your Team as a Staff Engineer
Tuesday Nov 17 / 11:45AM PST
Most "AI for engineers" content is about typing faster. That's IC-level work. Staff engineers have a different question to answer. When AI raises the floor on what every engineer can ship, what is the staff engineer's job, and where does the leverage actually come from now?
Jordan Cutler
Senior Staff Engineer and Web Tech Lead @Pinterest, Author of High Growth Engineer Newsletter
The Revenge of the Data Scientist: Why Reliable AI Needs Evals, Traces, and Metrics
Tuesday Nov 17 / 01:35PM PST
Most teams can now ship an AI prototype by calling a foundation-model API. The hard part is knowing whether that system works when real users, messy data, and business consequences arrive.
Hamel Husain
Machine Learning Engineer, 20+ Years in Applied AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science
Platform Engineering for Agents
Wednesday Nov 18 / 10:35AM PST
Agentic tools amplify what’s already in the codebase. The agent works through your code, your architecture decisions, and the documentation around them. It follows what it can read and guesses at the rest.
Mark Khuzam
Senior Software Engineer @Netflix, Previously Led the Consumer Web Platform Team @OpenTable
No More Small Systems, How AI May Bring Large System Problems to Everyone
Wednesday Nov 18 / 11:45AM PST
Once you figure out how to use AI to make your organization productive, you will soon find you have a whole new set of problems. While some of those problems will be novel thanks to LLMs, many of them are just the result of there being "more stuff".
Adam Bender
Technical Lead for Enterprise Engineering @Google
You Can't Read the Code Anymore - Verifying Software in the Age of AI
Wednesday Nov 18 / 02:45PM PST
AI writes most of the code now, so the hard part of engineering has moved from authoring to the part we’re worse at - verifying. With the incentives all pushing toward shipping faster and faster - the rational move is to skim the diff, click through a little manual QA, and ship on vibes.
Omer van Kloeten
Principal Engineer @Forter, 25+ Years in Software Engineering, Now Building an AI-Agent Framework to Tame Legacy Systems and Reduce KTLO