I attend conferences fairly irregularly, but this week I spent four days at AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco — Moscone Center, 6,000-odd other people building AI products, plus 300 speakers. There were daily workshops and no shortage of people milling around chattering about token spend and tooling.
As an avid builder and frontline user of AI at my day job, I also spend nights and weekends tinkering on apps and pushing the tooling to the max, so I was excited to get the chance to attend and hear from some of the biggest companies and leaders in the space.
Takeaways
The most interesting talks I went to were about harnesses for AI tools — protecting them from the outside world, plus context injection techniques. I also found some of the talks about memory more interesting than I expected.
The Vercel after-hours event was the highlight
I was fortunate enough to get access to the Vercel x Factory after-hours event at SF MoMA. I really enjoyed the lightning talks there, especially the points made by Vercel's Chief of Software, Andrew Qu. I've always been really inspired by and proud to be a Vercel user, and it was cool to see the founder of skills.sh talk through his best practices.
I left that night feeling reinvigorated — the first time I'd felt that way in a long time.
Would I go again?
Absolutely. The conference was extremely well organized and easily one of the most exciting I've been to.