John

Piloting agents in GitHub Copilot - Christopher Harrison, Microsoft

Jul 26, 2025 · 59:07

Christopher Harrison (Microsoft) demonstrates GitHub Copilot's agent capabilities for AI Engineers, arguing context is key to effective pair programming. He explains Copilot's modes—completion, chat, edit, local agent, and coding agent—and how Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables access to external tools like databases. Harrison shows how Copilot-instructions.md files provide project-specific guidance, and how coding agent runs within ephemeral GitHub Actions environments with strict security (no external access, only write to its own branch). He emphasizes that AI doesn't change DevOps fundamentals: tests still run locally and via PR workflows, and code review remains essential. The lab covers assigning issues to Copilot, configuring MCP servers, and using .instructions files for reusable patterns, with a repeat session at 3:30 PM.

Good design hasn’t changed with AI — John Pham, SF Compute

Jul 21, 2025 · 20:25

John Pham of SF Compute argues that good design principles—speed, trust, accessibility, and delight—remain unchanged even with AI. He demonstrates these through SF Compute's onboarding, which loads in under 300ms using server-side rendering and a 14KB fog image animated with stacked transparent layers and no third-party JavaScript, respecting reduced motion preferences. Trust is built by setting clear expectations (e.g., '3 steps, under a minute'), auto-filling forms via browser autocomplete, and avoiding layout shifts. Delight comes from color psychology to slow users, peak-end bias (ending with a beautiful San Francisco scene), and the GPU habitat: a live video feed of GPUs implemented as stacked divs and a looping video, with a prediction cone that smooths nested menu interactions. Accessibility includes semantic HTML, screen reader testing, and pausing animations for reduced motion. These techniques turn users into super fans while growing total addressable market.

Frontier Feud: Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, Thinking Machines — Barr Yaron, Amplify

Apr 19, 2025 · 22:26

Teams from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta FAIR, and Thinking Machines compete in a Frontier Feud game hosted by Barr Yaron at the AI Engineer Summit 2025. Surveyed AI engineers name Ilya Sutskever as the most influential AI researcher, with Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Hinton, and Yann LeCun also on the board. Cost is the top consideration when choosing a model, followed by latency, eval scores, and open vs. closed source. The buzzword everyone is tired of hearing is AGI, with RAG and prompt engineering trailing. In the fast money round, Cursor tops favorite AI tools, 'Attention Is All You Need' wins most influential paper, and hardware failure is the biggest 2 a.m. nightmare. The winning team, Rocco's Basilisk, takes home a massive llama and other prizes.