Call for Proposals: Software Craftsmanship in the Age of AI

We’re entering the era of agentic software engineering. The best developers are discovering that building with agents doesn’t replace the need for craftsmanship; it demands new forms of it. When your system can reason, plan, and execute, you need different methods to make it dependable. You need context engineering, observability for nondeterministic systems, and the art of orchestrating agents rather than just writing code.

For our March event, hosted by Addy Osmani and Tim O’Reilly, we’re looking for the pioneers who are figuring this out in production. We don’t want high-level theory. We want war stories, demos of “background coding” workflows, and deep dives into how you are combining the rigor of traditional engineering with the flexibility of AI. If you have a story to share about how you’re using agents to build innovative and effective AI-powered experiences, we want to hear it.

Our program is a mix of invited sessions and community proposals. We’re specifically looking for five-minute lightning talks that will make attendees say “Wow!” and rush to their terminals to try it themselves. We’re not interested in high-level “Future of AI” fluff, generic “Intro to LLM” tutorials, or marketing pitches for products. We want:

• War stories: “Here’s how our agent broke in production, and here’s how we fixed it.”
• Workflows and demos: Show us your tool-to-tool workflows, local agent setups, or custom MCP servers.
• Tactical advice: How do you test a nondeterministic agent? How do you version-control prompts?

Key topics and tracks

We’re interested in practical applications of the following themes:

• Orchestrating background coding agents: What emerges when coding becomes asynchronous and autonomous? Show us how you use agents to handle tasks like debugging, refactoring, or documentation in the background, and how you’re chaining agents across environments.
• MCP and Agent Skills: How are you using them to integrate existing code into workflows via tool calls?
• Quality and reliability: How do you maintain quality standards with AI-generated code? We want to hear about guardrails, evals, code review, and human-in-the-loop patterns that actually scale.
• Agentic interfaces (UI/UX): How are you moving beyond the “chatbot” paradigm? Show us interfaces that are generative, adaptive, and agent native.

We’re also still interested in hearing about topics we explored in our previous events:

• What’s changed about how you code, what you work on, and the tools you use?
• Are we working toward a new development stack? How are your architectures and patterns changing as you move toward AI-native applications?
• How is AI changing the makeup and workload of your dev teams?
• What have you done to maintain quality standards with AI-generated code?
• What types of tasks are you taking on that were previously too time-consuming to accomplish?
• What problems have you encountered that you wish others had told you about when you were starting out on your journey?
• What kinds of fun projects are you taking on in your free time?

One last thing: Feel free to surprise us. With the market moving this fast, you may be doing something amazing that doesn’t fit the program as we’re envisioning it today but that the AI coding community needs to hear about. Don’t be afraid to color outside the lines.

• Speaker bio, link to profile picture, and contact information
• Talk title, duration, short summary, and description (300 words max)
• Video from a previous talk (URL) or a short sample video of you making a presentation

Please note: Presentations as proposed should be no longer than five minutes.

Our program committee will review all submissions and notify you of our decision by February 27.

• CFP opens: January 12, 2026
• CFP closes: February 20, 2026
• Decision notifications sent to those who submitted talks: February 27, 2026
• Conference: March 26, 2026