Strands Agents

Tell the Robot What You Want — Sandhya Subramani, AWS

Aug 29, 2026 · 17:23

Sandhya Subramani of AWS demonstrates Scout, a Raspberry Pi rover using the open-source Strands Agents framework, arguing that an agent layer lets robots handle natural-language requests beyond their trained policies. She shows Scout answering an untrained question, spinning, and chatting over Telegram, all while running three Strands agents at once (thinker, communicator, and disabled voice). Five lines of code connect a robot to an agent, and Strands supports over 40 robots in eight categories. She explains the four-layer architecture and hybrid cloud/edge design, where the agent decides what to do and the policy decides how. Her goal is a stepping stone to vision-language-action models as large as LLMs, so robots need less task-specific training.

Your Agent Is Wasting Tokens and You Don't Know It - Erik Hanchett, AWS

Jun 28, 2026 · 5:55

Erik Hanchett, a Senior Developer Advocate at AWS, presents five specific techniques to reduce token costs in agent workflows without changing prompts or models. He demonstrates caching system prompts with 'cachePrompt' to avoid resending full context, and routing tasks by difficulty using cheaper models like Claude Haiku for simple requests. He advises offloading large tool results by storing them externally and sending only summaries, capping tool loops with a max iterations setting to prevent infinite loops, and trimming conversation history using a sliding window that keeps only the last 10 messages while optionally summarizing older context. These methods directly address common cost pitfalls, such as using expensive models for trivial tasks and letting context windows grow unchecked.

Building Agents at Cloud Scale — Antje Barth, AWS

Aug 2, 2025 · 19:00

AWS Principal Developer Advocate Antje Barth demonstrates how to build and scale AI agents using cloud-native patterns, arguing that specialized agents will reinvent customer experiences. She showcases Alexa Plus, which orchestrates hundreds of expert systems across 600M+ devices and tens of thousands of services, and the Amazon Q Developer CLI agent, shipped in just three weeks. Barth introduces Strands Agents, an open-source Python SDK for building production-ready agents that supports multiple model providers (Claude, Llama, OpenAI) and over 20 prebuilt tools including memory, RAG, and multi-agent workflows. She demonstrates integrating MCP servers via Lambda with DynamoDB for session storage, and previews upcoming A2A protocol support and a future of personal agents connecting to agent stores.