Coding for the Future Agentic World

May 8 AI Codecon was a huge success. We had amazing speakers and content. We also had over 9,000 live attendees and another 12,000 who signed up to be able to view the content later on the O’Reilly learning platform. (Here’s a post with video excerpts and some of my takeaways.) So we’re doing it […]

Jun 23, 2025 - 19:40

May 8 AI Codecon was a huge success. We had amazing speakers and content. We also had over 9,000 live attendees and another 12,000 who signed up to be able to view the content later on the O’Reilly learning platform. (Here’s a post with video excerpts and some of my takeaways.)

So we’re doing it again. The next AI Codecon is scheduled for September 9. Our focus this time is going to be on agentic coding. Now I know that Simon Willison and others have derided “agentic” as a marketing buzzword, and that no one can even agree on what it means (Simon has collected dozens of competing definitions), but whatever the term comes to mean to most people, the reality is something we all have to come to grips with. We now have LLMs with specialized system prompts, using tools, chained together in pipelines or running in parallel, running in loops, and modifying their environments. That seems like a pretty good starting point for a working definition.

In the September 9 AI Codecon, we’ll be concentrating on four critical frontiers of agentic development:

Agentic interfaces: Moving beyond chat UX to sophisticated agent interactions. New paradigms don’t just require new infrastructure; they also enable new interfaces. We’re looking to highlight innovations in AI interfaces, especially as agentic AI applications extend far beyond simple chat.
Tool-to-tool workflows: How agents chain across environments to complete complex tasks. As an old Unix/Linux head, I love the idea of pipelines (and now networks) of small cooperating programs. We are now reinventing that kind of network-enabled approach to applications for AI.
Background coding agents: Asynchronous, autonomous code generation in production. When AI tasks start running in the background, expect either magic or mayhem. We’d prefer the former, and want to show the cutting edge of how to build safer, more reliable agents.
MCP and agent protocols: The infrastructure enabling the agentic web. While the first generation of AI applications have been centralized monoliths, we’re convinced that the agentic future is one of cooperating AIs, interoperating not only with applications designed for humans but also with AI-native endpoints designed to be consumed by AI agents. MCP is a great start, but it’s far from the end of protocols for agent-to-agent communication. (See my post “Disclosures. I Do Not Think That Word Means What You Think It Means.” for an account of how communication protocols enable participatory markets. I’m super excited about the way that AI is creating new opportunities for developers and entrepreneurs that are not capital-intensive, winner-takes-all races like the initial race for chatbot supremacy. Those opportunities come from the network protocols that enable cooperating AIs.)

The primary conference track will be arranged much like the May event: a curated collection of fireside chats with senior technical executives, brilliant engineers, and entrepreneurs; practical talks on the new tools, workflows, and hacks that are shaping the emerging discipline of agentic AI; demos of how experienced developers are using the new tools to supercharge their productivity, their innovative applications, and user interfaces; and lightning talks that come in from our call for proposals (see below). We’ll also have a suite of in-depth tutorials on separate days so that you can go deeper if you want. You can sign up here. The mainstage event is free. Tutorials are available to O’Reilly subscribers and can also be purchased à la carte—trial memberships will also get you in the door. Read More