I just left the final day of the @aiDotEngineer World's Fair Conference in San Francisco. Kudos to @swyx for putting together a world-class …

I just left the final day of the @aiDotEngineer World's Fair Conference in San Francisco. Kudos to @swyx for putting together a world-class lineup of speakers and workshops! It really was an invigorating 4 days. A few reflections: -> The open-source AI developer experience is so much more exciting than enterprise Sure, the expo floor had its polished, enterprise-ready booths. But the energy was in the talks — open-source projects free to build however they see fit. Highlights: @pbakaus - Truly on the cutting edge of AI development. Anyone doing UI work should check out his project @impeccable_ai. What he's built is pure wizardry @CoreyGallon - web automation extraordinaire. I thought I was pretty good with playwright but his claude-agent solution blasted those perceptions aside. Jaws were on the floor @BHolmesDev - super engaging and informative speaker, showing off Hubble and the open source @warpdotdev -> We're so early They say startups are like building a plane while you're flying it, but this seems to be true for the AI industry as a whole. Memory is still in its infancy, maybe because the best memory systems need to be custom tailored to a specific environment or use case. @RLanceMartin touched on this in his talk, and I'm looking forward to seeing his posts on dreaming Local AI is barely out of the gate, too. Consensus seems to be that running your own setup is still not for the faint of heart, even for technically-minded folks, though this appears to be changing soon. @TheAhmadOsman is a legend for all of his work distilling the complexity -> Velocity is up. Code quality isn't. "Code is provable. Software is not." was the line from @tariqshaukat's talk on verifiability: AI speeds up development but multiplies bugs and maintenance along the way. Models will keep getting better at writing working code — but will they ever match tier-1 code that's perfectly adapted to a specific business? Either way, I'm leaving inspired, with a long list of things to tackle. Happy building, everyone 👋

Source: Swyx (X) | 2026-07-02