Agents for Everything Else — swyx

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.

Hi

everyone. I am not the Chief AI Officer of the UK. Unfortunately, he had to leave for a personal reason. But you get me. Thanks for staying so long. I hope everyone is having a good time. Thank you.

It's so endearing and heartwarming to hear from you guys. I'll take you a little bit into how we build AI Engineer with AI. And it's probably the biggest revelation that I've had. So we've had a lot of really warm reception from you guys, and I think it's really great.

And I think this is something that we really try to engineer. And hopefully, this is our first event in London. Hopefully you have us back next year.

One thing I wanted to say for those who are newer to us, I do one of these keynotes every single AIE. The first, very first one, three years ago, I talked about the productivity gain that you get from the increased AI, from the increased usage of AI.

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 per every 12 to 18 months. And I think it's still continuing to trend that way.

The third year, we started to talk about tiny teams, which was basically this definition that I had, that teams with more millions in revenue than the number of employees. And I even curated an entire track at the World's Fair about this, where we sort of summarized it as the tiny teams playbook if you're interested in building that.

The reason I liked this emphasis is because I think people are maybe too egotistical about looking for the one person billionaire or unicorn founder. Every company can have a tiny team, whether you're small or large. And I think when I look at how we run AI Engineer, me being the leadership of Ben Li and myself, we are also a tiny team.

This is us. It's just nine full-time people. And we are running a business that is more than $9 million. So we are a tiny team. And I wanted to show you the most significant changes in our workflow since we started this three years ago.

By the way, this is our taking the AGI pill moment. Did you guys get the AGI pills?

Yes.

Yes. Very proud of this. This is my brainchild. If one of your coworkers is not sufficiently AGI pilled, you should prescribe one of this. You are all AGI doctors now. OK. Our stack was very stable and completely non-AI, which is very ironic for an AI conference.

We do Figma, React, Supabase, Tidal, Google Sheets, Sessionize. And then I had this funny, weird moment where I joined Cognition and started talking, started using coding agents seriously at work, mostly because they were free. 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 company website. All well and good. Then something strange starts happening. I start introducing this is a workflow of our contract designer now, full-time, 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.

I just added Devin to it. And ultimately, 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 shit. So coworkers are doing it for me.

You should use coworkers for doing this. And which, by the way, leads me to my first lesson, which is any time there's random yak shaving, I think one underappreciated 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 a model of productivity that doesn't sufficiently appreciate parallelism and not just autonomy, I think, and sort of depth of the yak shaving is not fully capturing the benefit of agents.

So anyway, back to the agent story. Hooked up Devin to Figma. And in very short order, we have a perfectly functioning website that is pixel perfect to the Figma. And to me, that was a surprise because I'd never done it before.

You always mistrust marketing until you see it for yourself. And more importantly, our designer was very happy about it. And that's basically the website that you see live today when you go to AI.Engineer. The other interesting thing that happened was then we started using it more.

After one initial success, you start using it more. 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 exploding in usage. Like, what the hell?

And when you dig into it, it's very interesting. So first of all, I start kicking off some work. And then I go to bed. And then my designer, who's in Indonesia, wakes up and starts messing with Devin. It 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 was no instruction manual. It was just mostly like, how would you communicate with another human being? And so I work mostly with the 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. We start working on things that we would never normally have worked on. Nobody has supported this, so I assume none of you had discovered it. But there's an Easter egg on the website.

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

I saw a tweet that was viral about a design aesthetic that I liked. I threw it into Devin. Oh, pops. And then 127 replies later. Literally, I popped it in. I was like, oh, let's just see what the client will do for me.

I don't want to waste my designer's time. I just want to see what a client does for me. Designer jumps in and does and 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.

I'm so sorry for this. 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. I am getting more work out of my employees because they enjoy doing it, because the feedback cycle for them from waiting, blocking on me or a contracted developer that we have is gone.

Literally, they have the idea. They go do it. And they're doing more things. They're doing animations. They're doing polish, things that we've just I'm getting work that I've never gotten out of my employees before. I think that's something that's something you should appreciate too.

If you haven't noticed, I'm no longer talking about agents for coding or how many lines of code I'm producing. I'm getting more productivity out of my humans. And 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.

Then obviously, OK, I had that success with Figma to website. I have the success with tweet to website. What else? You start to think about other use cases. This whole conference is a giant data management problem. I have to sync with 130 speakers and a couple dozen sponsors and all the attendees that come in with all various needs.

And really, it's just a CMS. We've messed with the sanity. I'm not the biggest fan of sanity in the world because I want to keep some sanity to myself. But basically, I can throw in spreadsheets and Devin can manage that for me.

And once I really I think the unlock happened when I threw away the CMS and just committed that to code, but used that code as my sort of source of truth. And let Devin, whatever coding agent you use, start to manage it.

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

No other further communication is needed. I can just forward the email. I can paste a screenshot, whatever. And that kind of volume lets us, as a small team of nine people, manage a 1,000-person conference. We're going to manage 6,000 people in San Francisco this fall, this summer.

And I'm pretty sure we can stay the same size. It is incredible the amount of productivity that you can get once you're sufficiently onboarded and you have the workflows ironed out. We have agents for ETL. 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. These are very boring routine tasks. Well, there's another fun story that I can tell you is agents for buying.

So I saw this viral tweet about how somebody put a claw in Wall Street next to the Wall Street bull. And I was like, oh, that's funny. We should put a claw in front of our conference. And that's exactly and 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 think about it and ask it to do some more research. And I'll pop this guy. That's literally 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, like an open claw, nano claw, whatever client 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 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. I'm not here to only show Devin. I just advise for the company now. But I started exploring town because I think what's happening here is coding agents are kind of breaking containment.

There's all these other more fit for purpose knowledge management tools, like the wikis that Andrej Karpathy is talking about, that open claws is now adopting as well. You're going to see an explosion of this this year. This is 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 this summer. Here are all the tracks I'm planning. Here's my Apple Notes. On the left is my Apple Notes of all the people. It's intentionally small. And I threw it into town.

And oh, 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 SaaS. Here is me arguing with my employees about kicking out a SaaS tool and building it ourselves because we can. So I clearly have the most psychosis.

I think one of the annoying things is if you are in a position of power or management to deal with employees who are not as much in psychosis and try to bring them along the journey and not talk down or ignore their concerns, 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. So one method I'm approaching the sort of AI replacing SaaS concept, which I think should be relevant for a lot of you, is, well, let's identify the top three concerns and let's systematically reduce them.

And that's the process that we're going throughright now. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of that taste of, here's how AI is changing our business as managing the conference. It's come really a long way.

It's a consistent theme I'm seeing even among our speakers. This is Malta opening keynote, talking about how the 60% of the user base of Vercel now is bots, 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, Ido and Liad, who spoke today speaking on ETN about how basically your custom UI is kind of going away. You should ship UI to somebody else's app.

And I think these patterns of 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.

I no longer care about the Figma dashboard. I throw it into Cloud Cowork, 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.