Poolside

Your agent is blindfolded — Johan Lajili, Poolside AI

Jul 8, 2026 · 9:58

Johan Lajili of Poolside AI argues that the key difference between successful and disappointing AI coding agent experiences is whether the agent has a tight feedback loop to verify its work, essentially giving it "eyes" to test its own outputs. He demonstrates this with his CLI tool Spoolside for VS Code extensions that extracts logs and screenshots to reproduce bugs. Lajili predicts engineers will shift from product engineering to "AIX engineering" — focusing on making AI work on the product rather than on the product itself. He advises building ephemeral testing primitives and investing in agent self-serve tools, analogous to putting on your own mask first on an airplane.

AGI: The Path Forward – Jason Warner & Eiso Kant, Poolside

Dec 27, 2025 · 15:56

Jason Warner and Eiso Kant, co-founders of Poolside, present their vision and roadmap towards AGI-level capabilities for knowledge work, demonstrating their second-generation model Malibu Agent converting ADA code to Rust live on stage. They argue that next-token prediction paired with reinforcement learning is the key breakthrough, a contrarian bet they made two and a half years ago. The episode centers on their work in high-consequence code environments for defense and government, where agents must operate with tight permissions. They announce a large compute cluster of over 40,000 GB300s coming online and a public API release early next year via AWS Bedrock. Warner recounts meeting Kant through a failed GitHub acquisition, and Kant invites the audience to build with their models, emphasizing that future agents will handle tasks over days as intelligence scales.