spending the last week at @aidotengineer was awesome. too many great convos to cover them all, but jotted down some things that stood out:
- Lots of discussion around open source models. I spoke with consultants helping enterprise start to switching over low level tasks. Model routing companies and tools are seeing an uptick in usage and demand, and more innovation happening in routing (eg deterministic classifiers, etc). - As an extension of this topic, local model room was packed. More people are running or at least trying to build fully local coding agents, primary reason seems to be cost (it’s people spending lots on tokens). - They had a special area for “token billionaires” who are not people who have a billion tokens but spend a billion tokens… a week. - Saw that OpenClaw was a topic on some talks, but in my private conversations (biased by who I spoke with), I spoke with many people who had switched to Hermes Agent, and very few active OpenClaw users. - Fable came back during the conference (the strong Claude model that was temporarily banned by US govt). I heard people at the conference that it was butchered and not as good, but I also heard from people I trust that they didn’t notice a difference and that it’s great. It likely depends on what you’re using it for - my limited experience from this morning has been great. - Getting coding agents to work more reliably, over longer horizons, on bigger code bases was a constant discussion and many popular talks and workshops on this. I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the content and discussions really felt like engineers sharing their own tips, not selling or marketing their product (though there was plenty of that too). - The “company brain” topic came up a good amount as well. Distinct from “company knowledge/data”, this conversation was more around documenting how companies make decisions, not what data exists in their database.
