Charlie and the Software Factory & From Prompt to Loop
Details
Please Note: We are upstairs in the Minstrel suite.
Book Give Away From Packt!
We have a number of copies of two books to give away:
Charlie and the software factory
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/
Everyone wants a golden ticket: a software factory that turns ideas into secure, production ready software on demand. The newest factories run themselves. AI agents plan the changes, write the code, review each other's work, and iterate, with hardly a human on the factory floor.
In this talk, we'll take the full tour. We'll see where the humans now stand. We'll meet the Oompa Loompas of the modern factory: the agents doing the work, and the paved roads, conventions, and written-down knowledge they depend on. We'll confront the Willy Wonka problem. And we'll visit the kids who didn't make it out: the common ways an AI-powered factory go wrong, and how to avoid becoming a cautionary tale.
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.