Figma

How to Get Your Org to Adopt Coding Agents (Without Shipping Garbage) — Eyal Blum, Figma

Aug 28, 2026 · 17:43

Eyal Blum, a software engineer at Figma, explains why the engineers slowest to adopt coding agents are often the best ones, and how his org is making agent adoption safe without shipping garbage. He outlines a three-act adoption process and notes adoption is uneven, forcing AI-forward and skeptical teams to coexist. Blum argues the highest-value investment is verification — using Playwright MCP, moving deterministic checks down the testing pyramid, and having agents write tests first in TDD style. He advocates detailed planning over prompting: a week-long plan yields 20 small PRs, turning six weeks of coding into one week (a 5x speedup). He also addresses reduced developer agency, says AI-written communication needs explicit labeling because human attention is scarce, and advises treating skeptics' complaints as the roadmap to make agents safer.

Survive the AI Knife Fight: Building Products That Win — Brian Balfour, Reforge

Jul 14, 2025 · 14:10

Brian Balfour, CEO of Reforge, argues that winning in today's AI knife-fight requires answering 'What do I build and why will it win?' by focusing on proprietary data, unique functionality, and unmet customer needs rather than building custom AI. He illustrates with Granola, which entered a crowded AI note-taker market by understanding users wanted help taking better notes, not full automation, and assembled off-the-shelf AI (DeepGram, Anthropic, OpenAI) with unique data (user notes plus transcription) and functionality (Mac app, calendar integration) to create a competitive edge. Balfour warns competitive advantages now last only 2-3 weeks, so teams must sequence smaller moats continuously, each buying time to execute faster. The talk emphasizes treating AI as Lego blocks—assembling pre-trained models, data, and product superpowers into a system that spins a data flywheel.

How Zapier Builds AI Products and Features with the Help of Braintrust: Ankur Goyal & Olmo Maldonado

Nov 7, 2024 · 14:59

In this talk, Olmo Maldonado (Senior AI Engineer at Zapier) and Ankur Goyal (CEO of Braintrust) explain how Zapier uses Braintrust's evaluation and observability platform to build and improve AI features like AI Zap Builder and Copilot. They moved from 7 manual unit tests to over 800 automated evals, improving accuracy by nearly 300%. Braintrust's tracing capabilities let them dissect Copilot's multi-tool agent performance, leading them to adopt GPT-4 Turbo for the message router despite latency trade-offs. When switching to GPT-4.0 caused a regression below 80% scores, they diagnosed the issue via evals—GPT-4.0 was ignoring system prompts—and fixed it by relaxing prompt engineering and adjusting tool choices, recovering accuracy and cutting response time from 14 to 3 seconds. The episode details how eval-driven development and observability enable rapid iteration and reliable AI products at scale.