Bedrock

What if the network was the sandbox? — Remy Guercio, Tailscale

Jun 1, 2026 · 24:29

Remy Guercio from Tailscale argues that standard sandboxing conflates execution isolation with access control, proposing Aperture—an LLM gateway built on Tailscale's WireGuard identity network—which gives every connection verified identity (user, tag, or group) so agents get placeholders instead of real API keys, making exfiltration impossible. Aperture provides visibility into every tool call, bash command, and MCP request without instrumentation inside the container; internally at Tailscale, bash dominates over structured tool calls. Access permissions are configured via Tailscale's grants and ACLs, supporting quotas, cost controls across providers, and webhooks for tool calls. The gateway works at the LLM layer, capturing even non-tool-call agent behaviors like direct code execution, and is available on Tailscale's free plan.

Stop babysitting your agents... — Brandon Waselnuk, Unblocked

May 26, 2026 · 18:54

Brandon Waselnuk of Unblocked argues that the bottleneck for AI coding agents is not access (MCPs, tools) but understanding—they need a context engine that builds a research packet from codebase, Slack, PRs, and org structure before generating code. He debunks three myths: naive RAG suffers from satisfaction of search, more MCPs don't provide reasoning, and million-token windows don't enable effective reasoning. His team's context engine reduced a Zendesk integration task from 2.5 hours and 20.9M tokens (with MCPs only, but code that would have broken production) to 25 minutes and 10.8M tokens, earning a senior engineer's approval with one nitpick. Three hard lessons: optimize for understanding not access, resolve conflicts rather than hide them (e.g., Slack thread where CTO says code is wrong), and never cache answers because context changes daily. He demonstrates a social graph tool (open-sourced Monday) that maps engineers to code areas and collaborators, and shows a demo where the agent's MCP calls the context engine to generate a plan covering factory patterns, library modules, and client registration.

Spec-Driven Development: Agentic Coding at FAANG Scale and Quality — Al Harris, Amazon Kiro

Jan 9, 2026 · 1:03:50

Al Harris, principal engineer at Amazon, presents Spec-Driven Development (SDD) with Kiro, an agentic IDE that transforms prompts into structured requirements (EARS format), designs, and property-based tests to ensure code correctness. He argues that upfront specification—augmented by MCP servers for external context—improves reproducibility and quality over pure vibe coding. The talk includes a live demo: building an S3-backed checkpointer for a LangGraph dad joke generator, then discovering Agent Core’s native memory is more idiomatic. Harris contrasts SDD with Cursor’s planning mode, explains how specs evolve as living documentation, and discusses handling session length, context pruning, and brownfield codebases. The result is a claim that spending 5–10 minutes on specs yields higher accuracy and reliable, testable outputs.

VoiceVision RAG - Integrating Visual Document Intelligence with Voice Response — Suman Debnath, AWS

Dec 6, 2025 · 1:23:52

Suman Debnath, a Principal ML Advocate at AWS, demonstrates how Colpali—a vision-based retrieval model that treats each document page as an image and generates multi-vector embeddings via patch-based late interaction—can be combined with voice synthesis for a more intuitive RAG system. He explains that Colpali bypasses traditional OCR and preprocessing by directly embedding document images, then scoring query-page relevance through dot-product similarity across patches. The workshop shows how to embed pages, store them in Qdrant with multivector support, and retrieve top pages. Debnath then wraps this retrieval pipeline using the Strands Agent framework, adding a speak tool to output answers in natural voice. A live demo answers a textbook question about trophic levels, first using Bedrock to generate text and then speaking the answer in a female voice, all without a predefined system prompt. The talk positions Colpali as a complementary technique for complex visual documents like IKEA instructions or scanned forms, not a full replacement for traditional RAG.

Full Workshop: Realtime Voice AI — Mark Backman, Daily

Aug 3, 2025 · 1:09:41

In this hands-on workshop, Mark Backman and Aleś from Daily demonstrate how to build real-time voice AI agents using Pipecat, their open-source Python framework, and Google's Gemini Multimodal Live API. They explain that Pipecat's modular pipeline orchestrates audio transport, speech-to-text, LLM, and text-to-speech services, allowing developers to plug and play vendors like Deepgram, OpenAI, or Cartesia. The session highlights how speech-to-speech models like Gemini Live simplify architecture by handling transcription, LLM logic, and voice generation in one step, reducing latency to under 800 milliseconds. Key topics include the critical role of voice activity detection (VAD) for natural turn-taking, strategies for managing context windows to maintain accuracy, and the trade-offs between speed and reliability when using tool calls in real-time. Despite conference Wi-Fi issues, the team live-codes a functional bot and demonstrates interruption handling and the Word Wrangler game, showcasing Pipecat's production readiness with hundreds of thousands of daily calls.

Ship Agents that Ship: A Hands-On Workshop - Kyle Penfound, Jeremy Adams, Dagger

Jul 27, 2025 · 1:21:00

Kyle Penfound and Jeremy Adams from Dagger demonstrated building production-minded AI agents using Dagger, a programmable delivery engine that runs containerized workflows identically on laptops and in CI. They created a workspace submodule with tools — read file, write file, list files, and run tests — and wired it to an LLM (Claude 3.5) so the agent can edit code and validate changes through the project's actual test suite. The agent runs in isolated containers for determinism and traceability, with behavior visualized via Dagger Cloud. They extended the agent to respond to GitHub issues: a label triggers GitHub Actions to run Dagger, read the issue, hand the assignment to the agent, and open a pull request. The talk emphasized that Dagger's modularity lets developers give agents precisely scoped tools while reusing existing CI workflows, providing guardrails without sacrificing flexibility.

POC to PROD: Hard Lessons from 200+ Enterprise GenAI Deployments - Randall Hunt, Caylent

Jul 23, 2025 · 19:16

Randall Hunt from Caylent shares hard lessons from over 200 enterprise GenAI deployments, arguing that evals, embeddings, and prompt engineering matter far more than fine-tuning. He emphasizes that speed and UX are critical; a slow inference kills adoption, while techniques like generative UI and caching can mitigate latency. Hunt details real-world examples: using audio amplitude spectrographs for sports highlight reels, pooling multimodal embeddings for nature footage search, and noting that nurses prefer chat over voice bots in noisy hospitals. He reports zero regressions moving from Claude 3.7 to 4, and advises optimizing context and economics, such as leveraging Amazon Bedrock batch for 50% cost reduction. The talk underscores that knowing your end customer and minimizing irrelevant context are key to production success.

Introducing Strands Agents, an Open Source AI Agents SDK — Suman Debnath, AWS

Jun 27, 2025 · 14:26

Suman Debnath, a Principal ML Advocate at AWS, introduces Strands Agents, an open-source SDK that simplifies AI agent creation by requiring only a model and tools, eliminating scaffolding. He demonstrates building an agent in a few lines of code to read, summarize, and speak a file, using default tools. Another demo integrates Strands with an MCP server to generate animated math videos via Manim, requiring no system prompts—the model reasons autonomously. Custom tools can be created by decorating functions. Strands supports any model via LiteLLM or Bedrock, and is available at strandsagent.com with a GitHub repository for contributions.

Fun stories from building OpenRouter and where all this is going - Alex Atallah, OpenRouter

Jun 25, 2025 · 18:47

Alex Atallah, founder of OpenRouter, tells the story of how he launched the LLM aggregator in early 2023 after observing the open-source race sparked by Meta's Llama 1 and Stanford's Alpaca distillation under $600. He argues the inference market is not winner-take-all, citing OpenRouter's data showing Google Gemini growing from 2-3% to 34-35% of tokens over 12 months. The platform evolved from a simple model collection into a marketplace with over 400 models and 60 providers, solving architecture challenges like 30-millisecond latency, cancelable streams, and a middleware plugin system for web search and PDF parsing. Atallah explains that OpenRouter grew 10-100% month-over-month for two years, and he predicts future additions like transfusion models that generate images and more powerful geographic routing for enterprise optimization.

Anthropic in the Enterprise — Alexander Bricken & Joe Bayley

Apr 13, 2025 · 20:55

Alexander Bricken and Joe Bayley from Anthropic's Applied AI team argue that enterprise AI implementation often fails due to overengineering, poor data infrastructure, or lack of testing—but industry leaders achieve transformative results with Claude. They detail Anthropic's deployment models (API, cloud partnerships, enterprise solutions) and real-world case studies like Intercom's Fin agent, which solved 86% of support volume using Claude. Best practices include building evals early as intellectual property, identifying intelligence/cost/latency trade-offs based on use-case stakes, and avoiding premature fine-tuning by trying prompt caching, contextual retrieval, and agentic architectures first. They also highlight interpretability research and the Model Context Protocol for reliable AI deployments.

OpenLLMetry is all you need

Feb 22, 2025 · 9:12

Nir, CEO of Trace Loop, introduces OpenLLMetry, an open-source project extending OpenTelemetry for tracing and monitoring GenAI applications. OpenTelemetry, maintained by CNCF, standardizes logging, metrics, and traces across cloud environments, supported by platforms like Datadog, New Relic, and Grafana. OpenLLMetry provides over 40 automatic instrumentations for foundation models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere), vector databases (Pinecone, Chroma), and frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI). These instrumentations emit logs, metrics, and traces in OpenTelemetry format, allowing users to send data to any supported observability backend with a configuration change, avoiding vendor lock-in.

Claude plays Minecraft!

Feb 15, 2025 · 18:16

Derek from AWS demonstrates building Rocky, an autonomous Minecraft agent using Amazon Bedrock, Claude 3 Haiku, and serverless AWS services, proving agentic workflows enable AI to reason and act beyond chatbots. He explains the architecture: Minecraft server on ECS with Mineflare bot framework, agents for Bedrock with return of control, and prompt engineering for tasks like digging and building. In a live demo, Rocky jumps, finds players, digs a hole, and builds a double-decker couch from a chat command, inferring parameters from natural language. The code is open-source and built with CDK/CloudFormation, emphasizing that agentic AI can operate in complex 3D environments through tool orchestration and managed prompt design.

Cohere for VPs of AI: Vivek Muppalla

Feb 5, 2025 · 16:11

Vivek Muppalla, Director of Engineering at Cohere, details the company's enterprise AI strategy centered on security, customization, and deployment flexibility. He presents Cohere's product line: Command R and R+ for generation, plus advanced retrieval models like embeddings and the ReRanker, which reduces RAG costs by narrowing context. Key claims include a focus on enterprise-specific eval suites (health, HR, finance), out-of-the-box citations, and multilingual performance. Partnerships with Accenture and McKinsey bridge the last-mile gap, while wins often stem from private cloud deployment and data control. In Q&A, he recommends purpose-built classifiers for high-throughput production and notes current 128k context windows.