Dave

Evals-Driven Development for a Mental Health AI Coach — Akele Reed & Dave Revere, SonderMind

Jul 25, 2026 · 21:17

SonderMind engineers Akele Reed and Dave Revere explain how they built Sonder, a clinically grounded Mental Health AI Coach, using eval-driven development and modular guardrails to balance effectiveness and safety. They designed input and output guardrails as separate LLM judges to avoid over-calibration and ensure correct triggers, not more triggers. Dave describes a clinical feedback loop where therapist annotations become typed evals that gate releases, turning clinician judgment into CI. They open-sourced 200 input and 100 output guardrail scenarios, clinically reviewed and calibrated. The system uses a Supervisor/Executor/Evaluator architecture, and they turned off built-in guardrails of frontier models due to over-calibration. Every architectural decision prioritized user safety, with modularity enabling iteration without compromising safety.

[Full Workshop from Microsoft] Github Copilot - The World's Most Widely Adopted AI Developer Tool

Feb 7, 2025 · 1:19:45

This workshop from the AI Engineer World's Fair features GitHub's Christina Warren, Dave, Alex, and Harald presenting GitHub Copilot, the world's most widely adopted AI developer tool. They demonstrate Copilot's three interaction modes: ghost-text completions using GPT-3.5 for speed, inline chat (also GPT-3.5) for quick code edits, and the chat panel powered by GPT-4 Turbo for deeper conversations. Speakers emphasize prompt crafting—being specific, providing examples, and keeping relevant files open—to improve results. They show how to use slash commands (/fix, /explain, /test) and the new attach button for explicit context. The workshop uses GitHub Codespaces preconfigured with Python 3.11 and Copilot extensions; a coupon provides a 7-day free trial. Harald explains the trade-off between model quality and latency, and notes upcoming features like automatic agent delegation and workspace integration for cross-file edits.