Agents for Everything Else — swyx

Talk transcript

1. 0:00

   [upbeat music] The future of work has many paths.

2. 0:18

   Our next presenter will discuss the path that he walked with Devin as he organized this very conference. Please join me in welcoming to the stage the co-founder of AI Engineer Conferences, swyx. [upbeat music]

3. 0:33

   Oh. [audience applauding] Hi, everyone. Uh, I am not the chief AI officer of the UK. Uh, I-- unfortunately, he, he had to leave for a personal reason. Uh, but, you know, you get me.

4. 0:47

   Uh, thanks for staying so long. I hope-- [audience applauding] Is everyone having a good time? Thank you.

5. 0:51

   Uh, it, it's so endearing and, and, and heartwarming to, to hear from you guys. Uh, I'll take you a little bit into how we build AI Engineer with AI, and it's, it's probably the biggest revelation that I've had.

6. 1:05

   Uh, so yeah, we've had, we've had a lot of really warm reception from you guys, and I think it's really great. And, uh, I think this is something that we really try to engineer, and, and hopefully, you know, this is our first event in London.

7. 1:16

   Hopefully, you have us back next year. Um, one, one thing I wanted to, so for those who are newer to us, uh, I do one of these keynotes every single AIE.

8. 1:25

   Um, the, the first, very first one three years ago, I s- talked about the productivity gain that you get from the increased AI eng-- uh, from, from the increased usage of AI.

9. 1:35

   Um, and the second one, we talked about how you should just use more AI because the cost curve of AI is going down roughly a hundred times, uh, per, per every twelve to eighteen months, and I think it's still continuing to, to trend that way.

10. 1:50

    Um, the third year, we started to talk about tiny teams, uh, which, which was basically this definition that I had that teams with more millions in revenue than number of employees.

11. 2:00

    Um, and I even curated an entire track at the World's Fair about this, uh, where we ta-- where we sort of summarized it as the Tiny Teams playbook if you're interested in building that.

12. 2:09

    Uh, the reason I liked this emphasis is because, um, I think people are maybe too egotistical about looking at-- for the one-person billionaire or, or unicorn founder. Um, every company can have a tiny team, whether you're small or large.

13. 2:23

    Um, and I think when I look at how I-- how we run AI Engineer, uh, me being the, the, the leadership of Ben Li and myself, uh, we are also a tiny team.

14. 2:31

    Um, this is us. Uh, it's just, uh, nine full-time people, and, uh, we're running a business that is more than nine million dollars, so we are a tiny team.

15. 2:43

    Um, and I wanted to show you the most significant changes in our workflow, uh, since we started this two years ago. Uh, by the way, this is, uh, our taking the AGI pill moment.

16. 2:53

    Uh, did you guys get the AGI pills?

17. 2:55

    Yeah.

18. 2:55

    Yes. [laughs] I'm very proud of this. This is my brainchild. Uh, if one of your coworkers is not sufficiently AGI pilled, you should prescribe one of this. You are all AGI doctors now.

19. 3:07

    Okay. Our stack was very stable and completely non-AI, which is very ironic for an AI conference. Uh, we do Figma, React, Supabase, Tido, Fig-- uh, Google Sheets, Sessionize. Um, and then I had this funny, weird moment where I joined Cognition, uh, and, and started talking, uh, started using coding agents seriously at work, mostly because they were free.

20. 3:31

    Um, and I started adding it to the company Slack, and then I started doing things with it and showing people, "Hey, here's how you use it to do coding on the, the company website."

21. 3:41

    All well and good, and something strange starts happening. Um, I start introducing-- uh, this is, this is a, a c- a workflow of our contract designer, now full-time, um, uh, showing me a Figma page and asking me to go through it and expecting that we would take a week, two weeks, four weeks to turn it into reality.

22. 4:00

    Um, I just added Devin to it, um, and ul- and ultimately, uh, before I had to add Devin to it, I had to hook up Devin to Figma, and I'm not gonna be doing that shit.

23. 4:10

    So Cowork is doing it for me. You should use Cowork for, [laughs] uh, for doing this. And which, uh, which by the way, leads me to my first lesson, which is anytime there's, like, random yak shaving, I think one underappreciated, um, uh, benefit of agents is that they save you the yak shaves.

24. 4:24

    Like, all the dependency tree crawling of like, "Oh, no, I have to do that first. Oh, no, I have to do that first." And particularly when it comes to installing dependencies or fixing Python dependencies, fantastic for that.

25. 4:34

    And I think, um, a, a mo- model of productivity that doesn't sufficiently appreciate parallelism and not just autonomy, I think, uh, and, and sort of depth of the yak shaving is not fully capturing the, the benefit of agents.

26. 4:46

    Um, so anyway, back to the agent story. Uh, hooked up Devin to Figma, and we, uh, in very short order, we have a perfectly functioning website, uh, that is pixel perfect to the Figma.

27. 4:57

    And to me, uh, that was a surprise because I'd never done it before. You know, you always mistrust marketing until you see it for yourself. And more importantly, our, our designer was very happy about it.

28. 5:07

    Um, and that's the, that's basically the, the website that you see live today when you go to ai.engineer. Um, the other interesting thing that happened was then we started using it more, right?

29. 5:17

    After, after one initial success, you start using it more. Uh, something that you can't see because it's very small text, but I'm gonna highlight for you, is that that is two hundred and seven replies just exploding in usage.

30. 5:27

    Like, what the hell? Um, and when you dig into it, um, it's, it's very interesting, right? So first of all, uh, I start kicking off some, some work, and then I go to bed, and then, uh, my designer who's in Indonesia wakes up and starts messing with Devin.

31. 5:41

    Starts prompting Devin with red lines, uh, on annotations, which is something that, uh, Steve Ruiz, one of our speakers from yesterday, does with tldraw. And I never taught him to do this, and there's no instruction manual.

32. 5:52

    It was just mostly like, how would you communicate with another human being? And so I work mostly with a non-technical team, and I think that's very important that they need to be comfortable with agents, and I think they're finally at the point that they are.

33. 6:04

    Um, we start working on things that we would never normally have worked on. Uh, nobody has reported this, so I assume none of you have discovered it, but there's a Easter egg on the website.

34. 6:12

    Why? 'Cause I put it there. Why? 'Cause it was fun. 'Cause I could, right? So if you're on an ultra wide, you sc- you scan your mouse over the, the highlights, you'll, you'll see an Easter egg.

35. 6:21

    Um, uh, I saw a tweet that was viral a- about a design aesthetic that I liked. I threw it into Devin. Out pops, um ...

36. 6:32

    And then, and then, and then, you know, 127 replies later, uh, I, I, literally I popped it in. I was like, "Oh, let's just see what the, the clanker will, will do for me.

37. 6:39

    Uh, I don't want to waste my designer's time. I just wanna see what a clanker do, does for me." Designer jumps in,

38. 6:45

    um, and, and does, and does, and start, actually starts working on this thing which I thought was throwaway and fun. And the most interesting thing, it's so small I can't even read it.

39. 6:53

    I'm so sorry for this. Uh, so basically the reason he starts working on it, even though it's a throwaway project, is because it's fun, and I think that's something, uh, that was like a big aha moment for me.

40. 7:02

    Like, I am getting more work out of my employees because they enjoy doing it, because the feedback cycle for them from, like, waiting, blocking on me or a contract d- uh, developer that we have is gone.

41. 7:13

    Like, they, they just literally, they have the idea, they go do it, right? Um, and, uh, they're doing more things. They're doing animations, they're doing polish. Uh, things that we've just- I'm getting work that I've never gotten out of, uh, my employees before, and I think that's something that's appre- that's something you, you should appreciate, too.

42. 7:29

    Um, I'm-- If you haven't noticed, I'm no longer talking about agents for coding or, like, how many lines of code I'm producing. I'm getting more productivity out of my humans, and I, I, I think this is something that is a major theme for this year that I'm really trying to investigate, which is agents for everything else.

43. 7:45

    Um, then obviously, okay, I had that success with Figma to, uh, to, to website. I have the success with tweet to website. What else? Right? Like, you start to think about other use cases.

44. 7:57

    Um, this whole conference is a giant data management problem. Like, I have to sync with 130 speakers and a couple dozen sponsors and all the attendees that come in with all various, uh, needs.

45. 8:11

    Um, and really, uh, it's just a CMS, right? Like, we, we, we've, we've messed with the Sanity. I'm not a, the, the biggest fan of Sanity in the world, um, because I want to keep some sanity to myself.

46. 8:22

    Um, but, but basically, like, I, I can throw in, uh, spreadsheets and, and Devin can manage that for me. And once I really-- I think the unlock ho- uh, happened when I threw away the CMS and just kinda committed that to code, but used that code as my s- sort of source of truth, and let Devin, whatever

47. 8:36

    coding agent you use, uh, start to manage it. And so this entire schedule, uh, is managed by Devin. What does that mean? It means that whenever, um, someone comes in with a speaker change, for example, Marta, one of the speakers from today, uh, sends in an email, I just say, "Devin, handle it for me," right?

48. 8:54

    No other furth- further communication is needed. I can just forward the email. I can, uh, paste a screenshot, whatever. Um, and that kind of volume lets us as a small team of nine people manage a thousand-person conference, right?

49. 9:06

    We're gonna manage 6,000 people in San Francisco this fall, uh, th- this summer. Um, and w- I'm pretty sure we can stay the same size. Like, it, it is incredible the amount of productivity that you can get once you're sufficiently onboarded and you have the workflows ironed out.

50. 9:20

    Um, we have agents for ETL. We, we deal with an external vendor system that has data that we don't have in a, in a central source of truth, so I need to get the API key to sync over data and make sure there's a single source of truth.

51. 9:33

    Uh, these are very boring routine tasks. Um, well, there's, there's another, you know, another fun story that I can tell you is agents for buying. Uh, so I saw this viral tweet about how somebody put a claw in, uh, Wall Street next to the Wall Street bull, and I was like, "Oh, that's funny.

52. 9:47

    Like, we should put a claw in front of our, um, conference," and that's exactly... And so, so I asked Devin to research, "Where can I get a lobster in London?"

53. 9:58

    Devin comes back with phone numbers and email addresses and websites, and I just click through and, and think about it and ask it to do some more research, uh, and out pops this guy.

54. 10:08

    Uh, that's literally the, the lobster that you had was bought from Devin. Uh, and I think, um, this kind of personal automation for everything else, it just matters that you have an agent that has web access, that has some, uh, smart enough model.

55. 10:22

    Uh, it-- I mean, this is effectively a claw, right? Like, a, an OpenClaw, NanoClaw, whatever the, whatever clanker you call it. It doesn't really matter. It matters that you're using agents for things that you would otherwise have spent knowledge work on.

56. 10:34

    I might have had an executive assistant, I might have had a junior employee do these things for me, but now I can do it serverless on demand with a coding agent.

57. 10:44

    Um, I'm not here to only show Devin. Uh, I, I, you know, I o- I just advise with the company now. Um, but, uh, I, you know, I started exploring Town because I think, uh, what's, what's happening here is coding agents kind of breaking containments, right?

58. 10:57

    Um, there's all these other more f- fit for purpose knowledge management tools, uh, like the wikis that Andrej Karpathy is, is talking about that, uh, NanoClaw, uh, that OpenClaw is, is, is now adopting as well.

59. 11:08

    Um, you're gonna see an explosion of this this year. Uh, this is, like, probably the top trend of maybe top three to five trends, uh, of 2026 that I want to alert you to.

60. 11:17

    Um, so here is me managing t- uh, the World's Fair in 2020, uh, in, in, in this summer. Uh, here are all the tracks I'm planning. Here's my Apple Notes.

61. 11:27

    Uh, on the left is my Apple Notes of all the people. I'm, uh, it's intentionally small, and I threw it into, into Town, and on- out pops a nicely formatted Notion doc with, uh, research on all the speakers that I intend to, uh, solicit and, uh, think about curating.

62. 11:43

    Um, and then obviously once you get enough psychosis, you are thinking about replacing entire pieces of SaaS. Here's me arguing with my employees [laughs] about kicking out a, a SaaS tool and building it ourselves because we can.

63. 11:57

    Um, so I clearly have the most psychosis. I think one of the annoying things is if you're in a position of power or management to deal with employees who are, who are not as much in psychosis and try to bring them along the journey and, and not, uh, talk down or, or, or, or ignore their concerns, right?

64. 12:13

    Because they are very valid concerns, because they are exactly the people that will have to deal with your bullshit when you get it wrong, and we do get it wrong.

65. 12:20

    Um, so, uh, one, one ch- one top, one method I, I, I'm approaching these sort of AI replacing SaaS concept, which I think is, is, should be relevant for a lot of you, uh, is, well, let's identify the top three concerns and let's systematically reduce, uh, reduce them.

66. 12:34

    And that's the process that we're going through right now. So, um, I just wanted to give you a little bit of that t- taste of like, here's how AI is changing our business, uh, as managing the conference.

67. 12:44

    Um, it's come really, it's come really a long way. I- it's a, it's a consistent theme I'm seeing even among our, our speakers. Uh, this is Malta opening keynote, uh, talking about how the, the 60% of the, the, the sort of user base of Vercel now is bots, is, is, is agents.

68. 13:00

    It's not humans. So actually, your dashboards don't matter. Your APIs matter, your CLIs matter, your MCPs matter. Um, here is the MCP, uh, apps guys, Ido and Liad, uh, who spoke today, um, on, speaking on ETN about how basically your custom UI is kind of going away.

69. 13:17

    Like, you should ship UI to, uh, somebody else's app. And I think, like, this patterns of, like, how your primary user is changing is really shifting towards what people are calling agent experience, and I think that's something that, again, I'm really inspired by and focused on because it is helping me, right?

70. 13:32

    I no longer care about the Figma dashboard. I throw it into co- Cloud Cowork and I hope that it works for me. Um, so that's my message. Agents for everything else are coming.

71. 13:42

    Wake up, use it, bring it home to work. If people are insufficientally bought on, prescribe them one of these. Thank you. [clapping] [upbeat music]