Alex Volkov

W&B from CoreWeave

Alex Volkov is an AI Evangelist at Weights & Biases by CoreWeave and the founder and host of ThursdAI, a weekly podcast and newsletter tracking the fast-moving AI engineering world. Each week, Alex and his crew break down new model releases, benchmarks, evals, agentic engineering patterns, API changes, open source releases, and the tools developers are actually using to build with AI. Before ThursdAI, Alex spent 20 years as a full-stack engineer and founded an AI startup, giving him a builder’s view of what matters and what is just launch-week noise. He helps AI engineers stay current without having to read the entire internet every week.

Sessions (1)

The Z/L Continuum: Should AI Engineers Still Read Code?

10:45 AM·Leadership 2 · Room 3020

At AI Engineer Europe, two of the best speakers gave directly opposite advice. Zechner: slow the f*** down, read every line your model writes. Lopopolo: code is a liability, you don't even open the IDE anymore. Both got applause. The room walked out confused. On the train back I sketched the Z/L Continuum on a napkin — a five-stop spectrum from "read the clanker code" to "what IDE?" — and the whole week clicked into place. In this talk I'll walk through the Continuum, introduce FOMAT (Fear of Missing Agent Time — coined backstage by Michael Richman), and make four arguments: the Continuum is real, your stop is per-task not per-person, model capability bends everything toward L, and FOMAT is a filter problem, not an agent problem. You'll leave with a vocabulary for the argument every AI engineer is having right now. Audience takeaways A shared vocabulary (Z, L, the five stops) for the debate splitting AI engineering teams FOMAT — name the fear so you can manage it A per-task framework for choosing where on the Continuum to operate Why capability drift makes "I'll never let it cook" a losing position over time Speaker: Alex Volkov · ThursdAI · @altryne

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