Socrates Day 3 |
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31 January 2026 - Ilanz
Up at 7 I went for a walk and discover the Via da Polacs, resolving to run there the next day. The morning was cold but beautiful as the sun hit the high mountains first.
After breakfast I first went to Dominik Berner's talk on "Building an AI secretary for email", but it was quickly hijaked. Eventually Dominik found himself building the secretary with the open source tool n8n.io. Apparently Dominik's other talks also got hacked. The tool seemed a lot like Zapier or IFTTT, with the AI just coming in to write the email although that was just an OpenAI integration.
Hijaking a talk
The it was time to see Christof Gutscher's talk debating "Clean Code". (He was also my roommate for the weekend). He cheated a bit, starting off with a video which we then debated. People had lots of opinions on the subject, but I had trouble feeling engaged by it.
After lunch I really started to learn the extent of what I do not know with Marius Colacioiu's talk "Hands on coding agents". He had created a repo for the tutorial where he went through using an AGENTS.md in your repository to give whatever agent you're coding with context and task structure. The particular tool he used for agentic coding was Ampcode. Also of interest were Geoff Huntley's blog on ralph and Marius' own blog.
An AI has become so prevalent that OWASP even now has an LLM Top Ten Risks as Martin Günther explained in his interactive talk that had us each take a risk, understand it, and explain it.
Thereafter was Ilari Aegerter's talk on "Productive Neuroticism" (not productive) another of Christof's where we played Baba is You as a mob programming exercise (apparently useful for interviews).
The day ended with raclette and conversation.
