AI/ES/25/11 Code/CODE/21 Fri/1640 Hard-Won Lessons from Building Effective AI Coding Agents

• 4:40pm - 4:59pm Talk: Hard-Won Lessons from Building Effective AI Coding Agents Person/Nik Pash IDE/Cline

  • Talk: Hard-Won Lessons from Building Effective AI Coding Agents

    • Most of what's written about AI agents sounds great in theory — until you try to make them work in production. The seductive ideas (multi-agent orchestration, RAG, prompt stacking) often collapse under real-world constraints. Why? Because they optimize for the wrong thing. In this talk, Nik Pash shares hard-won lessons from building large-scale coding agents at Cline — what failed, what survived, and why the next leap forward won't come from clever scaffolds, but from evals and environments that truly measure and improve reasoning. Attendees will walk away with a clearer sense of what actually drives progress — and what's just noise.