Track host
About the track
Agents went from demo to production faster than the engineering practices around them could mature. The agent loop — plan, call tools, reflect, repeat — is the most visible part of an agent system, but it's a small fraction of what's needed to run one reliably and securely. Underneath the loop sits a stack of concerns that frameworks don't solve for you: portability across rapidly obsoleting models, durable state for long-running runs, deployment pipelines that ship daily, runtime sandboxes for code that agents generate and execute, and the observability you need to debug a system that keeps changing its mind. Each is a discipline in its own right, with conventions still being invented. In this track, we'll work through each layer with practitioners shipping agents in production today, drawing out the lessons that turn a compelling demo into a system you can stake a business on.
Sessions in this track
Wednesday 18 November. 5 sessions per track, chosen and introduced by the Track Host.
10:35 Ballroom BC Session Platform Engineering for Agents Mark Khuzam Senior Software Engineer @Netflix, Previously Led the Consumer Web Platform Team @OpenTable 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. 11:45 Ballroom BC Session Avoiding Prompt Debt: Building Resiliant AI Apps that Grow With the Ecosystem Drew Breunig CEO & Cofounder CMPND, Editor of O'Reilly's "Context Management Handbook", Writer on AI & Data at dbreunig.com, Previously Data Science & Product Lead PlaceIQ Details coming soon. 13:35 Ballroom BC Session AI/ML Infrastructure for Agents Details coming soon. 14:45 Ballroom BC Session Dreams on Paper: How Agents Learn from Experience Brian Douglas Co-founder and CEO @Paper Compute Co. Agents produce high-fidelity traces of everything they do. But traces alone don't produce memory. This talk introduces three primitives for turning session history into something actionable: 15:55 Ballroom BC Session Continuous Testing and Feedback Loops for Non-Deterministic Systems Details coming soon.$2,835, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends September 8th. All pass options.
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.