June AI Meetup - Agent Management & Engineering Habits

The bottleneck has moved. Agents can now take action on your behalf, and the people who know how to manage them well will pull ahead. Caelan Huntress will share why agent management is the next high-value skill set, and Blake Burgess will demonstrate how a senior engineer builds habits, hooks, and opportunities around agents at work and beyond. Drinks, demos, and practical takeaways included.

Meet up with your local AI community on the Second Monday of June at EPIC Innovation:

5:30–6:00 pm — Drinks & Networking
6:00–6:45 pm — Agent Management: The Next High-Value Skillset — Caelan Huntress
6:45–7:30 pm — Agent Habits with an Engineer's Mindset — Blake Burgess
7:30–8:00 pm — Drinks & Open Q&A

This month's Meetup dives into the management skills agentic AI demands, and the daily habits of an engineer already working alongside agents.

Agent Management: The Next High-Value Skillset — Caelan Huntress
AI agents are changing the way work gets done. As agentic systems become more capable, our real advantage will not come from technical proficiency. It will come from knowing how to manage AI agents well.

Scoping agentic projects, managing autonomous systems, evaluating their performance, and designing the information environments that make agents effective — these are the skills of the future. This intermediate-level session is for proficient AI operators, team leaders, and decision-makers who want to understand the next layer of AI capability.

In this session, you will learn:

• What AI agents are, and how they differ from simple chat-based tools
• Which new skills matter when agents start taking action on your behalf
• How organisations can identify useful agentic projects
• What tools can be used to build agent harnesses
• What it takes to manage, monitor, and improve AI agents in production
• Why context engineering, system prompts, and performance evaluation are becoming core professional capabilities

Agent Habits with an Engineer's Mindset — Blake Burgess
What are AI agents, really, and what can they actually do? Blake brings 20 years of programming experience to a motivational, actionable walkthrough of agents in practice. Expect serious local agents and cloud agents, explained simply.

We will work through some jargon because words are important, and with a newfound understanding of "harnesses" and "models" we will look at how a senior engineer approaches agents — for work stuff, and other stuff. You will start to see the habits, hooks, and opportunities where agents can play a part, and then you can try it, too.

You will learn:

• The difference between local agents and cloud agents in everyday use
• How a senior engineer thinks about harnesses and models
• Where agents fit into existing workflows without rebuilding them
• Practical habits and hooks you can adopt straight away

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When: Monday, 8 June, 5:30–8:00 pm
Where: EPIC Innovation, Christchurch
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Sponsored by the AI Coaching Academy. Come have some 🍻 beer and wine🍷 and raise a glass with your local AI Community!
https://ai-coaching.academy/