How AI is changing the way software gets built in 2026, told firsthand by the people building it in Silicon Valley.
Software engineering has been transformed this year. Not gradually, suddenly. Claude Code, Cursor, and agentic workflows no longer just autocomplete lines; they write entire features, debug across codebases, and ship pull requests. Junior engineers produce at senior-level velocity, senior engineers operate at staff-level scope, and small teams now ship what once took thirty people.
This is not a future trend. It has already happened. Each week this summer, one practitioner who is living that change joins us to share how their day-to-day engineering work has shifted, because the field our students are entering has already changed.
Eight sessions on Thursdays between May 28 and July 23. Each session is a 30-minute talk followed by 15 minutes of Q&A.
| # | Date | Speaker | Company |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | May 28 | Daniel Svonava | Superlinked |
| 2 | June 11 | Chris Wang | OneFourTwentyFour |
| 3 | June 18 | Zain Hasan | Together.AI · cancelled |
| 4 | June 25 | Patrick Devine | Ollama |
| 5 | July 2 | Kalpit Singh | SingleStore |
| 6 | July 9 | Jackie Lee | Science VR |
| 7 | July 16 | Richard Hsu | Nuro |
| 8 | July 23 | Ravi Rohith | Big Tech |
Build systems that build systems
Daniel Svonava · CEO, Superlinked
Our journey from AI-assisted to AI-first development on a complex product that is all about reliability and performance: a new open source AI model inference engine.
Learn about our development process, project management, and the internal tooling that makes it possible to productively burn billions of tokens per engineer monthly, weekly, and even daily.
About the speaker: Daniel Svonava is CEO of Superlinked, an Index-backed sovereign inference startup. Previously an ML Tech Lead at YouTube Ads, he joins us to share practical tips on agentic software development and broader trends in the industry.
Tales From The Trenches
Chris Wang · Founder, OneFourTwentyFour
Chris’ consulting work varies widely — from Rails upgrades to sunsetting products to hiring initial engineering teams. He has seen hundreds of workflows belonging to developers he has worked with, interviewed, and learned from. This talk will dive into his views on the current state of interviewing, developer workflows, and the best & worst practices when using (or not using) AI.
About the speaker: Chris is a backend/infra consultant and founder of OneFourTwentyFour. Prior, he worked at SF-based startups that are now acquired by companies like Elastic and Checkr. When offline, he’s biking, backpacking, breaking things, and a bunch of other activities that don’t start with a “b”.
Patrick Devine · Ollama
From Copilot to Colleague: How AI Is Changing Real Software Engineering Workflows
Kalpit Singh · Director of AI Solutions, SingleStore
AI is no longer just a coding assistant that suggests the next line. In 2026, it is becoming a real collaborator across the software engineering lifecycle: helping teams explore requirements, understand unfamiliar code, generate implementation options, write tests, debug failures, and document decisions. This talk shares a practical view of how frontier AI is changing day-to-day engineering work in real teams.
About the speaker: Kalpit Singh is Director of AI Solutions at SingleStore, where he leads AI platform initiatives and helps teams apply AI to real engineering and customer problems. His work spans AI agents, developer workflows, engineering quality, and practical adoption of frontier AI in production settings.
Jackie Lee · Science VR · with Edison Lee
Nuro’s Autonomous AI Hill-Climb: Lessons from Deploying 50+ AI Employees and Autoresearch Agents for Self-Driving Cars
Richard Hsu · Frontier AI Engineering, Nuro
About the speaker: Richard Hsu leads Nuro’s Frontier AI Engineering team, where his team drove Nuro’s rapid AI ascent through three generations of work: from the adhoc AI chatbot you prompt, to the AI Employee that solves problems on its own, to the continuous self-improving autoresearch AI agent infrastructure. Each infrastructure and use case is shipped in production with real ROI and learnings. And this talk is the story of the ascent.
Architects, Not Code Writers: Why System Design Matters More in the Age of AI
Ravi Rohith · Big Tech
As AI agents take on more of the actual coding, this talk makes the case that system design becomes more important, not less, with a surprising, quantifiable reason why. Drawing on how coding agents actually consume tokens and compute, it explores the hidden cost of messy code in the age of AI, and what engineers should do differently as a result. Expect a few examples, some numbers that may change how you think about “clean code,” and a practical case for treating architecture as a first-class skill in an AI-driven workflow.
Shipping production code daily with AI tools.
Hands-on technical founders, not just vision people.
Applying frontier research to real products.