Max Headroom 
May 8 AI Codecon was a huge success. We had amazing speakers and content. We also had over 9,000 live attendees and another 12,000 who signed up to be able to view the content later on the O’Reilly learning platform. (Here’s a post with video excerpts and some of my takeaways.)
So we’re doing it again. The next AI Codecon is scheduled for September 9. Our focus this time is going to be on agentic coding. Now I know that Simon Willison and others have derided “agentic” as a marketing buzzword, and that no one can even agree on what it means (Simon has collected dozens of competing definitions), but whatever the term comes to mean to most people, the reality is something we all have to come to grips with. We now have LLMs with specialized system prompts, using tools, chained together in pipelines or running in parallel, running in loops, and modifying their environments. That seems like a pretty good starting point for a working definition.
In the September 9 AI Codecon, we’ll be concentrating on four critical frontiers of agentic development:
- Agentic interfaces: Moving beyond chat UX to sophisticated agent interactions. New paradigms don’t just require new infrastructure; they also enable new interfaces. We’re looking to highlight innovations in AI interfaces, especially as agentic AI applications extend far beyond simple chat.
- Tool-to-tool workflows: How agents chain across environments to complete complex tasks. As an old Unix/Linux head, I love the idea of pipelines (and now networks) of small cooperating programs. We are now reinventing that kind of network-enabled approach to applications for AI.
- Background coding agents: Asynchronous, autonomous code generation in production. When AI tasks start running in the background, expect either magic or mayhem. We’d prefer the former, and want to show the cutting edge of how to build safer, more reliable agents.
- MCP and agent protocols: The infrastructure enabling the agentic web. While the first generation of AI applications have been centralized monoliths, we’re convinced that the agentic future is one of cooperating AIs, interoperating not only with applications designed for humans but also with AI-native endpoints designed to be consumed by AI agents. MCP is a great start, but it’s far from the end of protocols for agent-to-agent communication. (See my post “Disclosures. I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means.” for an account of how communication protocols enable participatory markets. I’m super excited about the way that AI is creating new opportunities for developers and entrepreneurs that are not capital-intensive, winner-takes-all races like the initial race for chatbot supremacy. Those opportunities come from the network protocols that enable cooperating AIs.)
The primary conference track will be arranged much like the May event: a curated collection of fireside chats with senior technical executives, brilliant engineers, and entrepreneurs; practical talks on the new tools, workflows, and hacks that are shaping the emerging discipline of agentic AI; demos of how experienced developers are using the new tools to supercharge their productivity, their innovative applications, and user interfaces; and lightning talks that come in from our call for proposals (see below). We’ll also have a suite of in-depth tutorials on separate days so that you can go deeper if you want. You can sign up here. The mainstage event is free. Tutorials are available to O’Reilly subscribers and can also be purchased à la carte—trial memberships will also get you in the door. 
The separate demo showcase will be sponsored (and thus free).
Call for proposals
Do you have a story to share about how you are using agents to build innovative and effective AI-powered experiences? We want to hear it. The AI Codecon program will be a mix of invited talks and your proposals, so we’re asking you to submit your idea for a quick five-minute lightning talk about cutting-edge work. We aren’t looking for high-level discussions; we want war stories, demos of products and workflows, innovative applications, and accounts of new tools that have changed how you work. You (collectively) are inventing the future at a furious rate. We’d love to hear about work that will make people say “wow!” and rush to learn more. Your goal should be to make the emerging future happen faster by sharing what you’ve learned.
After reading your proposal, we may ask you to present it as proposed, modify it, expand it into a longer talk, join a discussion panel, or appear in our associated demo day program.
Topics we’re interested in include:
- UI/UX—How are you or your company exploring agentic interfaces and moving beyond chatbot UX?
- How you’re using agents today—Are you handing off entire tasks to agents? What tasks are you handing off, and how are you integrating the agents’ work into the SDLC?
- Your tool-to-tool workflows—How are you chaining agents across environments and services to complete tasks end-to-end?
- Background coding agents—What’s emerging from more asynchronous and autonomous code generation, and where is this headed?
- MCP and the future of the web—How are agentic protocols unlocking innovative workflows and experiences?
- Surprise us. With the market moving this fast, you may be doing something amazing that doesn’t fit the program as we’re envisioning it today but that the AI coding community needs to hear about. Don’t be afraid to color outside the lines.
We’re also still interested in hearing about topics we explored in our previous call for proposals:
- What has changed about how you code, what you work on, and the tools you use?
- Are we working toward a new development stack? How are your architectures and patterns changing as you move toward AI-native applications?
- How is AI changing the makeup and workload of your dev teams?
- What have you done to maintain quality standards with AI-generated code?
- What types of tasks are you taking on that were previously too time-consuming to accomplish?
- What problems have you encountered that you wish others had told you about when you were starting out on your journey?
- What kinds of fun projects are you taking on in your free time?
So submit your proposal for a talk by July 18. And if you have a product you’d like to demo as part of our sponsored demo showcase, please let us know at AI-Engineering@oreilly.com.
Thanks!
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