Agents Without Code: How Skills, YAML, and Filesystems Replaced Python
Six months ago, building an agent meant writing a Python class with a `while` loop, tool definitions in dicts, manual state management or writing custom python functions. Today, you define an agent in a YAML file, drop a `SKILL.md` into a folder, and deploy. This talk traces the arc from "Agent in Python" to "Agent as filesystem". You'll learn the same agent built three ways: the hard way (Jan 2025), the simple way (Oct 2025), and the zero-code way (today).
About the Harness Engineering Track
Harness Engineering sessions at AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 in San Francisco.
When
Thursday, July 2, 2026
3:45 PM - 4:05 PM·20m
Where
Main Stage
Capacity: 4000 attendees
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Speaker
Philipp Schmid
Staff Engineer
Google DeepMind
@_philschmid
Philipp Schmid is a Staff Engineer at Google DeepMind working on Gemini, Gemma with the mission to help every developer to build and benefit from AI in a responsible way.