Agents for Everything Else — swyx

Channel: aiDotEngineer

Published at: 2026-05-01

YouTube video id: zepu8Kk6FBQ

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zepu8Kk6FBQ

[music]
>> The future of work has many paths.
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.
Oh.
>> [applause]
>> Hi, everyone.
Uh I am not the chief AI officer of the
UK.
Uh I unfortunately he he had to leave
for personal reason. Uh but you know,
you got me. Uh thanks for staying so
long. I hope has everyone having a good
time? Thank you.
>> [applause]
>> Uh
It is 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. 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. Hopefully, you
have us back next year.
Um one one thing I wanted to for those
who are newer to us, uh I do one of
these keynotes every single AIE. Uh the
first very first one 3 years ago, I
talked about the productivity gain that
you get from the increased AI
uh from from the increased usage of AI.
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 100 times uh
per every 12 to 18 months. And I think
it's still continuing to to trend that
way.
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. Um
and I even curated an entire track at
the World's Fair about this where we
where we sort of summarize it as the
tiny teams fable if you're interested in
building that. Uh the reason I liked
this emphasis is because
uh I think people are maybe too
egotistical about looking at for the
one-person billionaire
uh or unicorn founder. Um every company
can have a tiny team whether you're
small or large.
Um and I think when I look at how I how
we run AI Engineer, me being the the the
leadership of Ben Lear and myself, uh
we're also a tiny team. Um this is us.
Uh it's just uh nine full-time people
and uh we're running a business that is
more than $9 million. So, we are a tiny
team.
Um and I wanted to show you the most
significant changes in our workflow
since we started this 3 years ago. Uh by
the way, this is our taking the AGI pill
moment. Uh did you guys get the AGI
pills? Yes.
Yes.
>> [laughter]
>> Uh very proud of this is my brainchild.
Uh if one of your coworkers is not
sufficiently AGI pill, you should
prescribe one of this. You're all AGI
doctors now.
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,
uh Google Sheets, Sessionize.
Um
and then I've 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.
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." All well and good. And
something strange starts happening. Um I
start introducing uh this is this is a a
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, 2
weeks, 4 weeks to turn it into reality.
Um I just added Devin to it.
Um and I'll and ultimately uh before I
had to add Devin to it, I had to hook up
Devin to Figma and I'm not going to be
doing that So, Coworker is doing
it for me. You should use Coworker for
>> [laughter]
>> uh for doing this. And which which by
the way 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. 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. And I think uh
what model of productivity that doesn't
sufficiently appreciate parallelism and
not just autonomy, I think uh and and
sort of death of the yak shaving is not
fully capturing the the benefit of
agents. 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. And
to me, uh that was a surprise cuz I've
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. 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? 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 going to
highlight for you is that that is 207
replies just exploded in usage. Like,
what the hell? Um and when you dig into
it, uh 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 my designer who's in
Indonesia wakes up and starts messing
with Devin. Starts prompting Devin with
red lines on annotations, which is
something that 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. 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 that point that they
are.
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 an Easter egg on the website.
Why? Cuz I put it there. Why? Cuz it was
fun. Cuz I could. Right? So, if you're
on an ultra-wide, you scan you scan your
mouse over the the highlights, you'll
you'll see an Easter egg.
Um
uh
I saw a tweet that was viral about a
design aesthetic that I liked. I threw
it into Devin.
Out pops um
and and then and then you know, 127
replies later, uh I I literally I popped
it in in and I was like, "Oh, let's just
see what the the Clanker will do for me.
Uh I don't want to waste my designer's
time. I just want to see what Clanker
does for me." Designer jumps in.
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 is so
small, I can't even read it. 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 that was like a big aha moment
for me. 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
contracted uh developer that we have is
gone.
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. I think that's
something that's something you should
appreciate, too. 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
I think this is something that is major
theme for this year that I'm really
trying to investigate, which is agents
for everything else.
Um
then obviously, okay, I had the success
with Figma to
uh to to website. I had the success with
tweet to website.
What else? Right? Like you start to
think about other use cases. Um this
whole conference is a giant data
management problem. Like, I have to sync
with 130 speakers and uh
couple dozen sponsors and all the
attendees that come in with all various
needs. Um and really uh it's just a CMS,
right? Like we we we we've messed with
the sanity. I'm not a the biggest fan of
sanity in the world um because I want to
keep some sanity to myself. Um but but
basically like I I can throw in
spreadsheets and and Devin can manage
that for me. And once I really I think
the unlock
happened when I threw away the CMS and
just kind of committed that to code, but
use that code as my sort of source of
truth and let Devin, whatever 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? No other
further communication is needed. I can
just forward the email or I can 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? We're
going to manage 6,000 people in San
Francisco this fall uh this summer. Um
and I'm pretty sure we can stay the same
size. Like it is incredible the amount
of productivity that you can get once
you're sufficiently on-boarded and you
have the workflows ironed out.
Um
we have agents for ETL. We we deal with
an external vendor system that has data
that we don't have 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. 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,
well, that's funny. 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?
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 and I'll
post this guy.
That's literally the the lobster that
you had was bought from Devin
and I think
this kind of personal automation for
everything else it just matters that you
have an agent that has web access that
has some
smart enough model.
I mean this is effectively a claw right
here
an open claw nano claw whatever the
whatever cracker 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.
I might have had executive assistant I
might have had a junior employee do
these things for me but now I can do it
serverless on demand with according
agent.
I'm
not here to only show Devin.
Just advise with the company now
but I you know I started exploring town
because I think what's what's happening
here is coding agents going to break in
containments right?
There's all these other more fit for
purpose knowledge management tools like
the wikis that Andre Karpathy is is
talking about that nano claw that open
claw is is is now adopting as well.
You're going to see an explosion of this
this year. This is like probably the top
trend of maybe top three to five trends
of 2026 that I want to alert you to.
So here is me managing
the world's fair in 2020 in in in this
summer. Here all the tracks I'm
planning. Here's my Apple notes.
On the left is my Apple notes of all the
people I it's intentionally small and I
threw it into into town and on up pops a
nicely formatted notion doc with
research on all the speakers that I
intend to solicit and
think about curating.
And
then obviously once you get enough
psychosis you are thinking about
replacing entire pieces of SAS. Here is
me arguing with my employees about
[laughter]
kicking out a SAS tool and building it
ourselves because we can.
So I clearly have the most psychosis. If
anyone 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
then not
talk down or or or or ignore their
concerns right? Because they are very
valid concerns because they are exactly
the people that will have to deal with
your when you get it wrong and
we do get it wrong.
So
one one one top one method I I'm
approaching this sort of AI replacing
SAS concept which I think it it should
be relevant for a lot of you
is well let's identify the top three
concerns and let's systematically reduce
reduce them and that's the process that
we're going through right now. So I just
wanted to give you a little bit of that
taste of like here's how AI is changing
our business as managing the conference.
Um It's come really it's come really a
long way. It's a it's a consistent theme
I'm seeing even among our our speakers.
This is Malte's opening keynote talking
about how
the the 60% of the the sort of user base
of Vercel now is bots is is is agents
it's not humans. So actually your
dashboards don't matter your APIs matter
your CLIs matter your MCPs matter.
Here's the MCP apps guys Edo and Liad
who spoke today
on speaking on ETM about how basically
the your custom UI is kind of going away
like you should ship UI to 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? I no
longer care about the Figma dashboard I
throw it into cloud co-work and I hope
that it works for me.
So
that's my message agents for everything
else are coming. Wake up.
Use it. Bring it home to work.
If people are insufficiently bought on
prescribe them one of these. Thank you.
>> [music]