A product discussed on AI Engineer.

Teaching Coding Agents to do Spreadsheets - Nuno Campos, Witan Labs
Jul 8, 2026 · 19:09
Nuno Campos from Witan Labs explains how his team spent four months teaching coding agents to master spreadsheets, raising accuracy from 50% to 92% on a financial analysis benchmark. Key failures included a rigid three-agent architecture and standalone representations like SQL and XML. The breakthrough was replacing 15 separate tools with a single JavaScript repo tool offering persistent state and code-mode semantics, enabling agents to combine multiple operations in one call and drastically reduce timeouts. The team built high-fidelity formula and rendering engines to close the verification loop, and added domain knowledge prompts to focus the model. For evaluation, they moved from LLM-as-judge to deterministic comparisons using golden spreadsheets. Campos urges practitioners to replace many tool calls with real scripting languages, invest in feedback loops, and regularly revisit interfaces as model capabilities evolve.

Compilers in the Age of LLMs — Yusuf Olokoba, Muna
Nov 24, 2025 · 17:36
Yusuf Olokoba, founder of Muna, explains how they built a Python compiler that converts plain Python inference functions—like Google's 270M-parameter Gemma embedding model—into self-contained C++ and Rust binaries using LLMs within a verifiable pipeline. The process involves symbolic tracing to generate an intermediate representation, type propagation to infer types for native compilation, and LLM-driven code generation to mass-produce native implementations of Python operations. After compiling into a shared library, the model can be loaded via FFI from any language (e.g., Node.js) and exposed through an OpenAI-compatible client, enabling developers to run open-source models anywhere—locally, cloud, mobile—with minimal code changes. Olokoba details why they abandoned PyTorch FX due to its PyTorch-only focus and reliance on fake inputs, and how LLMs help scale the coverage of elementary operations. The talk argues that this compiler approach solves hybrid inference—small edge models working with large cloud models—by moving beyond Python and Docker to more portable, low-latency native binaries.

Conquering Agent Chaos — Rick Blalock, Agentuity
Jul 1, 2025 · 14:40
Rick Blalock, founder of Agentuity, argues that deploying AI agents remains the number one headache for developers, citing common issues like serverless timeouts (agents running 15–30 minutes), statelessness, and networking complexities. He demonstrates Agentuity’s platform, which treats agents as first-class infrastructure citizens: users scaffold projects via a CLI (supporting Bun, Python/UV, Node.js), write a simple request handler, and deploy with automatic routing, tunneling, and a built-in AI gateway that tracks costs per run. The platform decouples inputs and outputs—agents can be triggered via email, SMS, webhooks, or cron—and provides human and agent-facing telemetry via OTel tracing. Blalock notes Agentuity already hosts 50–60 internal agents and is building infrastructure agents to replace tools like PagerDuty, with plans to add Slack/Discord integrations and service-level reasoning capabilities.

Case Study + Deep Dive: Telemedicine Support Agents with LangGraph/MCP - Dan Mason
Jun 22, 2025 · 1:56:13
Dan Mason of Stride presents a case study on building autonomous agents for telemedicine support, replacing a human-driven button-pushing workflow with LangGraph, Claude, MCP, and a Node.js/React/MongoDB stack, achieving roughly 10X capacity increase. The LLM-driven virtual operations associate ("Ava") assesses patient messages, updates state with anchors and scheduled messages, and passes proposals to an evaluator agent that scores confidence and complexity, escalating to humans below 75% confidence. Mason explains how treatment "blueprints" in Google Docs are read directly by the LLM instead of using RAG, enabling new treatments to be added without writing code. He details the eval system using LLM-as-a-judge via PromptFu and retry logic for tool-calling errors, and discusses trade-offs around confidence scoring, prompt caching, and model selection (Claude for steerability). The team includes two software engineers, one designer, and Mason, who wrote most LangGraph code with AI assistance (Kline).

Invisible Users, Invisible Interfaces: Accelerating Design Iteration with AI Simulation - Alex Liss
Jun 3, 2025 · 12:37
Alex Liss, VP of Data Science and AI at Huge, argues that AI should be used as a tool for design itself rather than as a feature, proposing Intelligent Twins—AI simulations of user personas—to accelerate needfinding and interface testing. Citing a trust gap where only 32% of US adults trust AI, he advocates for repairing it by designing better interfaces, not adding chatbots. He demonstrates a global audit of sports websites (NBA, Olympics, Premier League) where Intelligent Twins simulated casual and super fans across 72 tasks, revealing strong navigation but declining performance in information architecture and engagement. The methodology uses computer use agents for visual evaluation and human-in-the-loop review to generate focused design briefs. Limitations include reproducibility and the need for test-and-control validation, with future potential in integrating MCP protocol for turning Figma components into code. Liss concludes that AI simulation can help teams gather insights faster and create simpler, trustworthy interfaces.

Function Calling is All You Need — Full Workshop, with Ilan Bigio of OpenAI
Apr 23, 2025 · 1:42:54
Ilan Bigio from OpenAI argues function calling is the essential primitive for building AI agents, demonstrating how to implement memory, delegation, asynchronous task execution, and even self-modifying tools—all using the same loop. Starting from a basic weather tool, he builds an agent that stores user facts in a JSON file, delegates complex requests to o1, runs multiple weather lookups in parallel with asyncio, and creates a Bootstrap agent that writes its own Python functions on the fly. He also shares practical tips from his work on Swarm and the Real-Time API, including a stay-silent function to prevent premature responses and the ability to read scripts with XML tags. The workshop emphasizes that sophisticated agent behaviors emerge from simple function calling patterns without needing heavy frameworks.

Vercel AI SDK Masterclass: From Fundamentals to Deep Research
Apr 20, 2025 · 59:52
Nico Albanese from Vercel delivers a workshop on building agents with the AI SDK, demonstrating how to use generateText, tools, and structured outputs to create a deep research clone in Node.js. He shows that switching between models like GPT-4o mini, Perplexity Sonar Pro, and Gemini Flash 1.5 requires only changing one line of code. Tools with maxSteps enable autonomous multi-step agents, as when the model fetches weather data for San Francisco and New York and sums the temperatures across three steps. The deep research workflow generates subqueries (e.g., 'requirements to become a D1 shotput athlete'), searches via Exa with live crawl, evaluates relevance with an evaluate tool that discards irrelevant results, and recursively deepens research using depth and breadth parameters. Finally, o3 mini synthesizes the accumulated research into a structured Markdown report, all in 218 lines of code.
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