This month is a field report. Eric Ness and Mike Halagan both made the trip to the AI Engineer World's Fair — the largest technical AI conference in the world, four days at Moscone West with 6,000+ engineers, 29 tracks, and 300 speakers — and they're bringing the highlights back to Minneapolis.
Rather than a tidy summary, this is a random walk through what they actually saw: the keynotes, the hallway conversations, the talks worth rewatching, and the themes that showed up everywhere once you started looking.
A few of the threads they'll pull on
The conversation has moved from building with agents to building the systems around them — harnesses, context, evals, and the plumbing that makes agents dependable in production. "Loops" was the unofficial buzzword of the event: engineers increasingly put themselves in an "outer loop" of oversight while agents run the inner execution loop. Coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, and Warp have largely replaced the IDE as the day-to-day interface. "Software factories," "forward deployed engineers," and "skills" all had their moment on the main stage. And open-weight models closed the gap with the frontier labs faster than most people predicted.
Eric and Mike will share what landed, what was overhyped, and what they think actually matters for engineers building here in the Twin Cities — plus the sessions and speakers worth going back to watch. And the good news: every talk from the fair is posted for free on the AI Engineer YouTube channel (youtube.com/@aiDotEngineer), so you can go back and watch anything that catches your ear.
Agenda
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
🥨 4:00 PM – Doors open + snacks and networking
👋 4:30 PM – Welcome and intro remarks
🎬 4:40 PM – Eric Ness & Mike Halagan present: A Random Walk Through the AI Engineer World's Fair
💬 5:30 PM – Networking and discussion
🚗 6:00 PM – Go home and build
Address
Studio Common Area
10 2nd St NE, Minneapolis, MN 55413
See Meetup photo album Studio Commo