Swyx: For those newer to us, I do one of these keynotes every single AIE. The first very first one 3 years ago, I talked about the productivity gain that you get from the increased AI usage. And the second one, we talked about how you should just use more AI because the cost curve of AI is going down roughly 100 times per every 12 to 18 months. And I think it's still continuing to trend that way. The third year, we started to talk about tiny teams, which was basically this definition that I had that teams with more millions in revenue than number of employees.

Swyx: I even curated an entire track at the World's Fair about this where we sort of summarize it as the tiny teams fable. The reason I liked this emphasis is because I think people are maybe too egotistical about looking at the one-person billionaire or unicorn founder. But every company can have a tiny team whether you're small or large.

Swyx: When I look at how we run AI Engineer, with me and Ben Lear as leadership, we're also a tiny team. We have just nine full-time people and we're running a business that is more than $9 million.

Swyx: Our stack was very stable and completely non-AI, which is very ironic for an AI conference. We use Figma, React, Supabase, Tido, Google Sheets, Sessionize.

Swyx: I joined Cognition and started using coding agents seriously at work, mostly because they were free. I started adding it to the company Slack and showing people how to use it for coding on the company website. All well and good. But something strange starts happening.

Swyx: A workflow of our contract designer now full-time was showing me a Figma page and asking me to turn it into reality. We would take a week, 2 weeks, 4 weeks. I just added Devin to it.

Swyx: Anytime there's like random yak shaving, I think one underappreciated benefit of agents is that they save you the yak shaves. Like all the dependency tree crawling of like, "Oh, no, I have to do that first. Oh, no, I have to do that first." And particularly when it comes to installing dependencies or fixing Python dependencies, fantastic for that.

Swyx: What model of productivity that doesn't sufficiently appreciate parallelism and not just autonomy, I think the death of yak shaving is not fully capturing the benefit of agents.

Swyx: We hooked up Devin to Figma and in very short order, we have a perfectly functioning website that is pixel perfect to the Figma. And to me, that was a surprise because I've never done it before. You always mistrust marketing until you see it for yourself. And more importantly, our designer was very happy about it. That's basically the website you see live today when you go to ai.engineer.

Swyx: After one initial success, you start using it more. I start kicking off some work and then I go to bed. And then my designer who's in Indonesia wakes up and starts messing with Devin. Starts prompting Devin with red lines on annotations, which is something that Steve Ruiz, one of our speakers from yesterday, does with TLDraw.

Swyx: I never taught him to do this. There's no instruction manual. It was just mostly like, "How would you communicate with another human being?" I work mostly with a non-technical team and I think that's very important that they need to be comfortable with agents and I think they're finally at that point that they are.

Swyx: We start working on things that we would never normally have worked on. There's an Easter egg on the website. Why? Because I put it there. Why? Because it was fun. Because I could. If you're on an ultra-wide screen, you scan your mouse over the highlights, you'll see an Easter egg.

Swyx: I saw a tweet that was viral about a design aesthetic that I liked. I threw it into Devin. The most interesting thing is why he starts working on it even though it's a throwaway project is because it's fun. And I think that's something that was like a big aha moment for me. I am getting more work out of my employees because they enjoy doing it. The feedback cycle for them from waiting or being blocked on me or a contracted developer is gone.

Swyx: They just have the idea, they go do it. They're doing animations, they're doing polish. I'm getting work that I've never gotten out of my employees before. I'm no longer talking about agents for coding or how many lines of code I'm producing. I'm getting more productivity out of my humans. This is a major theme for this year that I'm really trying to investigate, which is agents for everything else.

Swyx: I had the success with Figma to website. I had the success with tweet to website. What else? This whole conference is a giant data management problem. I have to sync with 130 speakers and couple dozen sponsors and all the attendees that come in with all various needs.

Swyx: It's just a CMS, right? We messed with Sanity. I can throw in spreadsheets and Devin can manage that for me. The unlock happened when I threw away the CMS and just committed code as my source of truth and let Devin manage it.

Swyx: This entire schedule is managed by Devin. What does that mean? Whenever someone comes in with a speaker change, I just say, "Devin, handle it for me." No other further communication is needed. I can just forward the email or paste a screenshot.

Swyx: That kind of volume lets us as a small team of nine people manage a thousand-person conference. We're going to manage 6,000 people in San Francisco this summer and I'm pretty sure we can stay the same size. It is incredible the amount of productivity that you can get once you're sufficiently on-boarded and you have the workflows ironed out.

Swyx: We have agents for ETL. We deal with an external vendor system that has data that we don't have in a central source of truth. I need to get the API key to sync over data and make sure there's a single source of truth. These are very boring routine tasks.

Swyx: Another fun story is agents for buying. I saw this viral tweet about how somebody put a claw next to the Wall Street bull. I was like, "Well, that's funny. We should put a claw in front of our conference." So I asked Devin to research, "Where can I get a lobster in London?" Devin comes back with phone numbers and email addresses and websites. The lobster you had was bought from Devin.

Swyx: This kind of personal automation for everything else, it just matters that you have an agent that has web access that has a smart enough model. It doesn't really matter if it's a claw, open claw, nano claw, or whatever. It matters that you're using agents for things that you would otherwise have spent knowledge work on. I might have had an executive assistant or a junior employee do these things, but now I can do it serverless on demand with an appropriate agent.

Swyx: I'm not here to only show Devin. But I think what's happening here is coding agents are going to break containment. There are all these other more fit-for-purpose knowledge management tools like the wikis that Andre Karpathy is talking about that Nano Claw and Open Claw are adopting as well. You're going to see an explosion of this. This is probably one of the top three to five trends of 2026 that I want to alert you to.

Swyx: Here is me managing the world's fair this summer. Here all the tracks I'm planning. Here's my Apple notes. I threw it into Town and on up pops a nicely formatted notion doc with research on all the speakers that I intend to solicit and think about curating.

Swyx: Once you get enough confidence, you are thinking about replacing entire pieces of SaaS. I'm arguing with my employees about kicking out a SaaS tool and building it ourselves because we can. I clearly have the most confidence. If you're in a position of power or management dealing with employees who are not as much into this and try to bring them along the journey, don't talk down to or ignore their concerns. Because they are very valid concerns because they are exactly the people that will have to deal with it when you get it wrong, and we do get it wrong.

Swyx: One method I'm approaching this is well, let's identify the top three concerns and let's systematically reduce them and that's the process that we're going through right now. I just wanted to give you a little taste of how AI is changing our business as managing the conference.

Swyx: This is a consistent theme I'm seeing even among our speakers. Malte's opening keynote talking about how 60% of the user base of Vercel now is bots—agents—it's not humans. So your dashboards don't matter, your APIs matter, your CLIs matter, your MCPs matter.

Swyx: Edo and Liad who spoke today on MCP apps, talking about how your custom UI is kind of going away. You should ship UI to somebody else's app. These patterns of how your primary user is changing is really shifting towards what people are calling agent experience. This is something that again I'm really inspired by and focused on because it is helping me. I no longer care about the Figma dashboard. I throw it into cloud co-work and I hope that it works for me.

Swyx: That's my message: agents for everything else are coming. Wake up. Use it. Bring it home to work. If people are insufficiently bought on, prescribe them one of these. Thank you.