Designing for the Agent Economy & From Prompt to Loop

Designing for the Agent Economy

What happens when software starts hiring software? AI has moved from novelty to infrastructure; reshaping how individual developers and entire organisations get work done.

But we’re now entering a more interesting phase. One where agents don’t just assist humans, they coordinate, negotiate, and transact with each other, forming the connective tissue of a new kind of economy.

In this talk, we’ll look at what “agentmaxxing” actually buys you, which assumptions about software and value exchange quietly break when agents start acting on their own behalf, and where the real opportunities, and traps, are hiding.

Charlie Allen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-dot/
Charlie’s career path makes no sense. He abandoned legal training for tech, taught English in Korea, co-founded a chai business, then talked his way into Amazon Alexa’s AI org, where he shipped a production NER model and walked out with the British Computing Society’s Digital Degree Apprentice of the Year award. After leading infrastructure recovery work at Darktrace, he went solo in 2026 to build agentic AI systems full-time. He’s currently agentmaxxing from Norwich.

From Prompt to Loop: What Changed in How We Build AI Agents in 2026

A practical walkthrough of the four-stage shift: prompt engineering → context engineering → harness engineering → loop engineering grounded in real examples (Claude Code’s goals, the Ralph technique, agent verifiers).

Nishant Kumar
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishant-kumar7
Nishant Kumar is a technology architect who’s spent nearly two decades building systems and is genuinely fascinated by what’s happening in AI right now. He works at the frontier of agentic AI, figuring out how to make AI systems reliable, safe, and actually useful for solving real-world problems. He’s endlessly curious about emerging tech and where it’s heading, and prefers to learn by building and then sharing what he finds through writing and speaking at community meetups. For him, the exciting part isn’t the hype rather it’s rolling up his sleeves and figuring out how these emerging technologies, tools can actually tackle the messy, hard challenges we face every day.