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You use AI agents every day: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor. But do you know what's actually happening under the hood? It turns out, the core of every AI agent is surprisingly simple: a while loop, a language model, and some tools.

In this live-coding session, we'll build an AI coding agent without any frameworks. We'll start from a bare frontier model call to an LLM and incrementally add capabilities. At each step, we'll hit a real limitation, understand why it exists, and solve it. You'll watch a basic chatbot evolve into a sophisticated coding agent with tools, conversation history, and guardrails.

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:
- explain the agentic loop that powers LLM agents
- identify the core components of AI agents
- build your own simple agent and extend it with custom tools

Matt Wynne
Programmer, Coach, Author

Matt was lucky enough to start programming in the mid 1980s when his dad brought home a BBC Micro from work. He's been making a living as a programmer since the late 1990s, and started trying to sneak agile practices into his work ever since he discovered the C2 Wiki in 2001. He was once fired for doing Test-Driven Development (TDD), because he was “going too slow”. In 2008 he joined the fledgling Cucumber open source project, and in 2011 the first edition of The Cucumber Book was published, co-written with Aslak Hellesøy, the creator of Cucumber. In 2013 Matt co-founded Cucumber Limited together with Aslak and Julien Biezmans. They grew this consulting and training business to around $1.5m turnover, training thousands of people around the world in Cucumber and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD), adding Seb Rose and Steve Tooke then Dr. Sal Freudenberg as partners. Matt developed the practice of Example Mapping whilst training a team in St. Louis, Missouri. Matt acted as Cucumber Ltd’s CEO for most of it’s life, handing over to Sal in the autumn of 2018. In 2019 Cucumber was acquired by SmartBear. Matt worked for them as full-time lead of the Cucumber Open source project until February 2023. One of his initiatives was finding ways to tackle the structural sexism and racism in open source. Originally from northwest England, he now lives in the mountain town of Nelson, BC in Canada on the unceeded territory of the Ktunaxa Nation, Sinixt Nation, and Syilx Peoples with his wife, two kids, a dog and a couple of cats. He enjoys back-country skiing, trail running and woodworking.
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Steven Diamante
Technical Coach at Diamante Technical Coaching

Steven Diamante is a technical coach who helps software teams get real value from AI coding agents. Most teams use AI to generate code fast, but then spend hours debugging. Steven teaches teams to use TDD and strict quality gates to keep AI agents steerable, ensuring they build the right thing in small, controllable steps. Through hands-on Samman Coaching, he helps teams transform how they work with AI while maintaining technical excellence. Outside of coaching, he enjoys playing guitar in his local church, reading a non-fiction book, or hanging out with his wife and two kids.

Zoom meeting opens around 9:30 AM PT
Zoom Presentation starts at 10:00 AM PT

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