Munich

martin westphal — martin's monthly agentic update

as always, the top updates martin finds exciting and valuable for all of us to pay attention to and play with in the field of agentic engineering. this month: glm 5.2 hype debunking, and the uncomfortable trendline behind "thinking harder made it worse". slides ↗

robert glaser on harness engineering — the pressure reactor of agentic engineering

agent output now arrives faster than humans can review it. models generate code, draw conclusions, and make decisions. making that work productive is no longer a question of which tool you plug in — it's a question of the environment around the agent: how the agent works reliably, how it self-corrects, and how its output becomes traceable change. that environment is the discipline robert calls harness engineering.

the talk showed what agent-legible environments look like and what role technical backpressure plays inside them. compilers, typecheckers, tests and linters are the easy part; the harder part is backpressure that comes from product, domain, security and operations, so technically correct output doesn't drift past the actual business goal. outcome grading is the other half: once you can grade behaviour precisely, machines can iterate against that grade — tests are only the most primitive form. there's an industrial lineage that rarely gets named here: the factory is part of the product it produces, and you improve both together. slides ↗

martin westphal — june agentic update: fable 5, loops vs factories & plugins

fable 5's capabilities, hype & fallout, "loops vs factories" as a way to think about agentic work, and plugins with real impact. slides (pdf) ↗

nikita filippov (anna) — from support automation to agentic operations

from inside anna money: why every automation worked only inside its own lane, the new roles the shift creates, and where to aim agents next. slides ↗

tereza iofciu — why agentic coding amplifies whatever your team already is

what it really takes for ai to be truly helpful — agentic coding amplifies the team you already are, for better or worse. slides (speakerdeck) ↗

more participants next time

we discussed with our hosting partner, egym, how to make participation more visitor-friendly — some couldn't join because they were on the waiting list. we're sorry for the wait, and we're improving.

egym has been generous, and more support is needed

egym did a fantastic job hosting and feeding us. we're also seeking additional sponsorship for snacks and speaker travel — please talk to your companies and see how you could help.

agentic engineering and organizational impact

we're committed to both themes — engineering and organizational — because they reinforce each other and can't be treated separately. topics like 10x org should appear at about a 30% rate versus engineering topics — a real differentiator from other meetups.