Siwei Gu

For the past year, our team has worked the way many teams are about to: each engineer driving a fleet of coding agents, with a shared memory layer underneath doing the remembering. This talk is the engineering report from that year, organized around one question: how much of your judgment can you formalize into environments and verifiers? Whatever stays informal, a human has to stay in the loop to provide.

The question plays out at three scales. Personal: which 90% of conversations not to remember, and why forgetting is a feature, not a bug. Loop: self-improvement is bottlenecked by verification, not generation. Where the verifier is deterministic, the loop closes (DeepMind’s AlphaEvolve on Borg scheduling: a discovered heuristic, in production over a year, continuously recovering 0.7% of Google’s fleet-wide compute). Where the verifier is taste, humans hold the merge (Meta’s TestGen-LLM: three mechanical filters first, then engineers accept 73% of what remains). Organization: at night, human review bandwidth is zero, so what your agents can safely do overnight is exactly the judgment you have formalized. That, not model choice, sets the ceiling.

Intelligence can be rented. Memory must be owned.