Mike Chambers

Ship it! Building Production Ready Agents — Mike Chambers, AWS

Jun 27, 2025 · 19:37

Mike Chambers, a developer advocate at AWS, demonstrates how to take a simple local agent—built with a Llama 3.1 8B model and a dice-rolling tool—and ship it to production at cloud scale using Amazon Bedrock Agents. He breaks down the essential components of an agent: model, prompt, loop, history, and tools. Then he live-deploys the agent with Bedrock Agents, configuring instructions and an action group wired to an AWS Lambda function that handles the dice roll. The fully managed service automates scaling, infrastructure, and the agentic loop. Chambers also highlights free courses on DeepLearning.AI and invites attendees to discuss MCP servers and the new open-source SDK for model-first agents.

From Software Developer to AI Engineer: Antje Barth

Jul 24, 2024 · 19:48

Antje Barth, a Principal Developer Advocate for generative AI at AWS, outlines five practical steps from software developer to AI engineer: understanding foundation models, getting hands-on with AI developer tools like Amazon Q Developer, prototyping with models via Amazon Bedrock, integrating agents, and staying up to date with community events. She demonstrates Amazon Q Developer's ability to generate, explain, and transform code, reducing unvaluable tasks from 70% to focus on creative work. Barth introduces Amazon Bedrock's unified Converse API for standardized model invocation across providers like Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and shows how agents can be built to control a Minecraft bot through reasoning and tool use. The episode concludes with the announcement of the AI Engineering Hub at the AWS loft in San Francisco for community workshops and events.