# Builder's Day: full site > Builder's Day brings together the people shipping real applications with AI. One day of talks, demos, and conversations with the builders, hackers, and makers on the forefront of the industry. Source: https://builders.day/llms.txt --- # Builder's Day ## Learn what it takes to ship AI in production AI developer conference, hosted by Prisma. Learn from and meet leading AI builders who are solving the hardest parts of running agents in production. Across 12 talks, you'll discover how to keep agents reliable and under control, carry memory across sessions, and build the infrastructure needed to run them at scale. - When: October 26, 2026, doors 8:30 AM - Where: SPIN San Francisco, 690 Folsom St #100, San Francisco - Tickets are $200 (early bird) until October 7, then $250: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 ## Hear it from the people building it 4 of 12 speakers are confirmed; the next 8 are announced round by round between now and the event. Every talk comes from someone running this in production, not a keynote about the future. - [CJ Brewer](https://builders.day/speakers/cj-brewer), Co-founder at Swirls AI and VP Ops at CipherStash: Could this just be a markdown file? Declarative agents for real operations - [Brian Douglas](https://builders.day/speakers/brian-douglas), Co-founder & CEO at Paper Compute: Dreams, Reflections, and Inceptions - [Corey Haines](https://builders.day/speakers/corey-haines), Founder at Conversion Factory: How I went from marketer to building AI marketing tools - [Tyler Benfield](https://builders.day/speakers/tyler-benfield), Platform Architect at Prisma: Talk to be announced ## What you'll leave with Builder's Day is single-track on purpose. No juggling rooms, no picking the wrong talk. Everyone hears the same 12 talks, so every hallway conversation starts from the same place. - **Patterns that survived production**: Twelve talks on coding agents, LLM apps, and the infrastructure underneath them, from people who run them for real. You leave with the architectures, the failures, and what actually held up. - **A room full of people shipping with AI**: One stage and one crowd, so you spend the day with the engineers, founders, and product folks building with AI in San Francisco right now. Small enough to actually meet them. - **Ping pong, drinks, and hallway talk**: SPIN is a ping pong bar, not an auditorium. Snack breaks, an afterparty with food and drinks, and the kind of conversations that turn into your next project or your next hire. ## Schedule Doors at 8:30 AM, talks and lightning rounds through 4:00 PM, then an afterparty with food and drinks. Full agenda: https://builders.day/schedule ## Venue We're taking over SPIN San Francisco for the day. Not a stuffy auditorium: an open, relaxed space built for hanging out between talks. Details: https://builders.day/venue ## Tickets Tickets are $200 (early bird) until October 7, then $250: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 ## Links - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 - Speakers: https://builders.day/speakers - Schedule: https://builders.day/schedule - Venue: https://builders.day/venue --- # Speakers October 26, 2026 · San Francisco. One stage, 12 speakers. Here is the first round of builders joining us on October 26, with more announcements on the way. 4 are announced so far; 8 more are still to be announced. ## [CJ Brewer](https://builders.day/speakers/cj-brewer) Co-founder at Swirls AI and VP Ops at CipherStash (https://swirls.ai) **Talk:** Could this just be a markdown file? Declarative agents for real operations How to take an agent from “roughly follow these instructions” to a declarative operational system with typed contracts, scoped tools, and human approval points. Most agent workflows can begin as a Markdown file: instructions, examples, a few tools, and a desired outcome. That is useful and often the right place to start. But a business cannot run on “roughly follow these instructions.” Once an agent touches customer data, sends emails, updates systems of record, or triggers work for a team, operational builders need to answer harder questions. What inputs are allowed? What outputs are guaranteed? Which actions can the agent take? What happens when something fails? Where does a human approve? This talk makes the case that the path from an agent prompt to an operational system is declarative. Make the agent’s inputs, outputs, tools, permissions, triggers, workflows, and approval points explicit. Then the system becomes inspectable, versionable, testable, and deployable. In engineering terms, we are bringing a familiar idea into agentic development: constrain the variable reasoning layer inside a defined contract. We’ll walk through how an inbox-to-CRM agent evolves from a Markdown instruction into a production-ready workflow with typed inputs and outputs, deterministic tool calls, scoped authority, durable execution, and human review. The thesis: businesses will increasingly run day-to-day through agents. The teams that succeed will not treat those agents as prompts. They will treat them as declarative operational systems. **Bio:** CJ Brewer is a systems-thinking builder. He has spent 12 years at VC-backed companies running solutions engineering teams and operations, and 15 years writing software that pulled him toward system design. He is currently VP of Operations at CipherStash and a co-founder of Swirls, where he works on agent and system infrastructure. Links: https://x.com/zcjbb, https://www.linkedin.com/in/brewercj/, https://github.com/calvinbrewer ## [Brian Douglas](https://builders.day/speakers/brian-douglas) Co-founder & CEO at Paper Compute (https://papercompute.com) **Talk:** Dreams, Reflections, and Inceptions Most teams shipping agents have plenty of records and almost no memory. Every session produces a full trace. The next session starts cold. The lesson that would have saved 8,000 turns, or 8,000 dollars, lives in a transcript nobody rereads. **Bio:** Brian is the co-founder and CEO of Paper Compute Co., building distributed systems primitives for AI agents. Paper Compute’s products include tapes (agent telemetry and skill capture) and cassettes (portable, on-prem enterprise compute units for AI agent workflows). Previously, Brian founded Open Sauced, which joined the Linux Foundation in 2024. He also led Developer Advocacy at GitHub, fostering early adopters through conversations with top open-source maintainers. Links: https://x.com/bdougieYO, https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas/, https://github.com/bdougie ## [Corey Haines](https://builders.day/speakers/corey-haines) Founder at Conversion Factory (https://conversionfactory.co) **Talk:** How I went from marketer to building AI marketing tools **Bio:** Corey Haines is the founder of Conversion Factory, a marketing agency for B2B SaaS, and the creator of Marketing Skills, an open-source AI agent toolkit for marketers. He has bootstrapped five SaaS startups and worked with more than 100 companies. Links: https://x.com/coreyhainesco ## [Tyler Benfield](https://builders.day/speakers/tyler-benfield) Platform Architect at Prisma (https://prisma.io) **Talk:** Talk to be announced **Bio:** Tyler is a Platform Architect at Prisma working on architecture and platform engineering, with a focus on database infrastructure, application hosting, and AI infrastructure. He brings more than 15 years of experience across consulting, startups, and large organizations, and has spoken at Epic Web Conf, KCDC, and All Things Open. He writes on database performance, distributed systems, and how to get reliable, high-quality output when delegating work to AI agents. Links: https://x.com/rtbenfield ## Tickets See them live on October 26. One day, one stage, 12 speakers at SPIN San Francisco. Tickets are $200 (early bird) until October 7, then $250: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 ## Links - Schedule: https://builders.day/schedule - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 --- # CJ Brewer, Co-founder at Swirls AI and VP Ops at CipherStash CJ Brewer is speaking at Builder's Day on October 26, 2026 at SPIN San Francisco in San Francisco. Company: Swirls AI (https://swirls.ai). Also: VP Ops, CipherStash (https://cipherstash.com). ## The talk Could this just be a markdown file? Declarative agents for real operations How to take an agent from “roughly follow these instructions” to a declarative operational system with typed contracts, scoped tools, and human approval points. Most agent workflows can begin as a Markdown file: instructions, examples, a few tools, and a desired outcome. That is useful and often the right place to start. But a business cannot run on “roughly follow these instructions.” Once an agent touches customer data, sends emails, updates systems of record, or triggers work for a team, operational builders need to answer harder questions. What inputs are allowed? What outputs are guaranteed? Which actions can the agent take? What happens when something fails? Where does a human approve? This talk makes the case that the path from an agent prompt to an operational system is declarative. Make the agent’s inputs, outputs, tools, permissions, triggers, workflows, and approval points explicit. Then the system becomes inspectable, versionable, testable, and deployable. In engineering terms, we are bringing a familiar idea into agentic development: constrain the variable reasoning layer inside a defined contract. We’ll walk through how an inbox-to-CRM agent evolves from a Markdown instruction into a production-ready workflow with typed inputs and outputs, deterministic tool calls, scoped authority, durable execution, and human review. The thesis: businesses will increasingly run day-to-day through agents. The teams that succeed will not treat those agents as prompts. They will treat them as declarative operational systems. ## About CJ Brewer CJ Brewer is a systems-thinking builder. He has spent 12 years at VC-backed companies running solutions engineering teams and operations, and 15 years writing software that pulled him toward system design. He is currently VP of Operations at CipherStash and a co-founder of Swirls, where he works on agent and system infrastructure. ## See CJ live on October 26 Tickets are $200 (early bird) until October 7, then $250: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 ## More speakers - [Brian Douglas](https://builders.day/speakers/brian-douglas), Co-founder & CEO at Paper Compute: Dreams, Reflections, and Inceptions - [Corey Haines](https://builders.day/speakers/corey-haines), Founder at Conversion Factory: How I went from marketer to building AI marketing tools - [Tyler Benfield](https://builders.day/speakers/tyler-benfield), Platform Architect at Prisma: Talk to be announced ## Links - All speakers: https://builders.day/speakers - Schedule: https://builders.day/schedule - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 - https://x.com/zcjbb - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brewercj/ - https://github.com/calvinbrewer --- # Brian Douglas, Co-founder & CEO at Paper Compute Brian Douglas is speaking at Builder's Day on October 26, 2026 at SPIN San Francisco in San Francisco. Company: Paper Compute (https://papercompute.com). ## The talk Dreams, Reflections, and Inceptions Most teams shipping agents have plenty of records and almost no memory. Every session produces a full trace. The next session starts cold. The lesson that would have saved 8,000 turns, or 8,000 dollars, lives in a transcript nobody rereads. ## About Brian Douglas Brian is the co-founder and CEO of Paper Compute Co., building distributed systems primitives for AI agents. Paper Compute’s products include tapes (agent telemetry and skill capture) and cassettes (portable, on-prem enterprise compute units for AI agent workflows). Previously, Brian founded Open Sauced, which joined the Linux Foundation in 2024. He also led Developer Advocacy at GitHub, fostering early adopters through conversations with top open-source maintainers. ## See Brian live on October 26 Tickets are $200 (early bird) until October 7, then $250: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 ## More speakers - [CJ Brewer](https://builders.day/speakers/cj-brewer), Co-founder at Swirls AI and VP Ops at CipherStash: Could this just be a markdown file? Declarative agents for real operations - [Corey Haines](https://builders.day/speakers/corey-haines), Founder at Conversion Factory: How I went from marketer to building AI marketing tools - [Tyler Benfield](https://builders.day/speakers/tyler-benfield), Platform Architect at Prisma: Talk to be announced ## Links - All speakers: https://builders.day/speakers - Schedule: https://builders.day/schedule - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 - https://x.com/bdougieYO - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas/ - https://github.com/bdougie --- # Corey Haines, Founder at Conversion Factory Corey Haines is speaking at Builder's Day on October 26, 2026 at SPIN San Francisco in San Francisco. Company: Conversion Factory (https://conversionfactory.co). ## The talk How I went from marketer to building AI marketing tools ## About Corey Haines Corey Haines is the founder of Conversion Factory, a marketing agency for B2B SaaS, and the creator of Marketing Skills, an open-source AI agent toolkit for marketers. He has bootstrapped five SaaS startups and worked with more than 100 companies. ## See Corey live on October 26 Tickets are $200 (early bird) until October 7, then $250: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 ## More speakers - [CJ Brewer](https://builders.day/speakers/cj-brewer), Co-founder at Swirls AI and VP Ops at CipherStash: Could this just be a markdown file? Declarative agents for real operations - [Brian Douglas](https://builders.day/speakers/brian-douglas), Co-founder & CEO at Paper Compute: Dreams, Reflections, and Inceptions - [Tyler Benfield](https://builders.day/speakers/tyler-benfield), Platform Architect at Prisma: Talk to be announced ## Links - All speakers: https://builders.day/speakers - Schedule: https://builders.day/schedule - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 - https://x.com/coreyhainesco --- # Tyler Benfield, Platform Architect at Prisma Tyler Benfield is speaking at Builder's Day on October 26, 2026 at SPIN San Francisco in San Francisco. Company: Prisma (https://prisma.io). ## Talk title Talk to be announced Tyler is confirmed for the stage. The talk title and details are coming soon. ## About Tyler Benfield Tyler is a Platform Architect at Prisma working on architecture and platform engineering, with a focus on database infrastructure, application hosting, and AI infrastructure. He brings more than 15 years of experience across consulting, startups, and large organizations, and has spoken at Epic Web Conf, KCDC, and All Things Open. He writes on database performance, distributed systems, and how to get reliable, high-quality output when delegating work to AI agents. ## See Tyler live on October 26 Tickets are $200 (early bird) until October 7, then $250: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 ## More speakers - [CJ Brewer](https://builders.day/speakers/cj-brewer), Co-founder at Swirls AI and VP Ops at CipherStash: Could this just be a markdown file? Declarative agents for real operations - [Brian Douglas](https://builders.day/speakers/brian-douglas), Co-founder & CEO at Paper Compute: Dreams, Reflections, and Inceptions - [Corey Haines](https://builders.day/speakers/corey-haines), Founder at Conversion Factory: How I went from marketer to building AI marketing tools ## Links - All speakers: https://builders.day/speakers - Schedule: https://builders.day/schedule - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 - https://x.com/rtbenfield --- # Schedule October 26, 2026 · San Francisco. Here's the shape of the day. Talks slot in as the lineup is announced, and every session is built to leave you with practical takeaways and something worth trying. 4 speakers announced so far: https://builders.day/speakers - **08:30** Doors open & check-in - **09:00** Welcome + keynote (Speaker TBA) - **09:30** Talk (Speaker TBA) - **10:00** Talk (Speaker TBA) - **10:30** Break: Light snacks available - **10:50** Lightning talk (Speaker TBA) - **11:00** Talk (Speaker TBA) - **11:30** Talk (Speaker TBA) - **12:00** Lunch: Attendees self-organize - **13:00** Ping pong & vibes - **14:00** Talk (Speaker TBA) - **14:30** Talk (Speaker TBA) - **15:00** Lightning talk (Speaker TBA) - **15:10** Break: Light snacks available - **15:30** Talk (Speaker TBA) - **16:00** Closing keynote (Speaker TBA) - **16:30** Networking & afterparty: Finger foods and drinks - **19:00** Doors close Want to be first to know when the next speakers are announced? Grab your ticket now. ## Links - Speakers: https://builders.day/speakers - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 --- # SPIN San Francisco October 26, 2026 · San Francisco. We're taking over SPIN San Francisco for the day. It's not your typical conference hall. Expect a space built for hanging out, sharing stories, and settling debates over ping pong. Talks are broadcast throughout the venue with audio and video, so you can grab a seat anywhere and relax. We'll have traditional seating too, if that's more your style. Address: 690 Folsom St #100, San Francisco, CA 94107 ## Photos - Ping pong tables beside lounge seating and wall art in the main hall at SPIN San Francisco - The open main floor at SPIN San Francisco with a glowing centerpiece table and lounge seating - A row of ping pong tables stretching past the bar and lounge at SPIN San Francisco - The covered patio at SPIN San Francisco with astroturf, a mural, and a ping pong table ## Links - Tickets: https://luma.com/event/evt-jCJjku9B32NCqB8 --- # Speak at Builder's Day October 26, 2026 · San Francisco. Submissions are closed. Thanks to everyone who applied, we're reviewing proposals now and will follow up if it's a fit.