# Speakers

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October 26, 2026 · San Francisco. Meet the founders, engineering leaders, and open source maintainers taking the stage on October 26. More speakers will be announced soon.

## [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

## [Johannes Schickling](https://builders.day/speakers/johannes-schickling)

Co-founder of Prisma

**Talk:** Declarative Agents

Agents are getting more capable, but helping them succeed still takes too much effort. A year of research at Compounding Technologies has led us to explore declarative agents as a better foundation.

**Bio:** Johannes Schickling co-founded Prisma and has spent years building developer tools. He is now doing AI research at Compounding Technologies to explore the building blocks of software factories.

Links: https://x.com/schickling, https://bsky.app/profile/schickling.dev

## [Will Madden](https://builders.day/speakers/will-madden)

Engineering Manager, ORM at Prisma (https://prisma.io)

**Talk:** Talk to be announced

**Bio:** Will leads the engineering team behind Prisma's open source ORM and guides its technical direction, with more than 15 years in software and an open source trail stretching back to 2008. He has appeared on podcasts including PodRocket to discuss ORM architecture and direction, and writes about ORM design, engineering leadership, and shipping software other engineers depend on.

Links: https://x.com/william_ma14406, https://github.com/wmadden

## [Shane Neubauer](https://builders.day/speakers/shane-neubauer)

Product Lead at Prisma (https://prisma.io)

**Talk:** About Our Stack: Integrated Products, Ideal for Agents

**Bio:** Shane is a product leader at Prisma with more than 15 years in technology, including five years prototyping new products at Google and founding a venture-backed startup of his own. He writes about product strategy, go-to-market, and building tools developers genuinely want to use.

Links: https://x.com/sneub, https://github.com/sneub

## [Boris Tane](https://builders.day/speakers/boris-tane)

Chief On-Call Officer at Polylane (https://polylane.com)

**Talk:** Talk to be announced

**Bio:** Boris Tane is the founder and CEO of Coreplane Labs, the company behind Polylane: agents that read your code, watch your infra, and fix production before you wake up. He's building self-operating software on a simple premise: nobody should be on-call.

Before Coreplane Labs, Boris founded Baselime, a Sequoia-backed, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform for serverless architectures. Cloudflare acquired Baselime in April 2024, and Boris went on to lead the Workers Observability team, building observability for Cloudflare Workers from scratch.

He has spent his career on the problem of understanding production systems, and has spoken about it at AWS re:Invent, Node Congress, SST Conf and the ClickHouse and Serverless London meetups. On his blog, boristane.com, he writes about on-call culture, observability, context engineering for AI agents, and what he learned starting, building and exiting a devtools startup.

Links: https://x.com/boristane, https://github.com/boristane

## Tickets

See them live on October 26. Hear them in person at SPIN San Francisco. More speakers will be announced soon. 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