How we Solved Agent Building
Andrew Qu
- When
- Thursday, July 23:20 PM – 3:40 PM · 20 min
- Where
- Main StageSan Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
At Vercel I've built a successful AI data scientist, that has taken the load off of our data team from answering ad-hoc data queries, and fields over 1,200 unique queries a day from just internal Vercelians. I've been building and iterating on it since last september, and it's gone through over 6 different rewrites, the newest one of which has inspired us to build a new agent framework (to be teased during the talk ;) ). I'd talk about why we build agents, how we build agents, and how to build effective agents in today's world. Just prompting, to adding bespoke tooling, to embedding claude code, to file system agents, to skills-based agents, to the new agent harness framework.
Speaker
Chief of Software, Vercel
Andrew is the Chief of Software at Vercel, where he leads the company's agent initiatives across product, infrastructure, and internal tooling in the Office of the CTO. He's the creator of skills.sh, the most popular way to discover and install new agent skills, and is building "an agent on every desk" inside Vercel. The most prominent so far is a data science agent that fields 2,000+ questions a day from Vercelians across engineering, finance, and go-to-market. Before Vercel, Andrew founded a Series B AI sales-tech company, and has worked at Meta and early-stage startups alike.
More in Harness Engineering
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- The 2026 State of AI EngineeringThursday, July 2 · 9:00 AM – 9:20 AM · Main Stage
- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Separating the Task from the ModelThursday, July 2 · 9:40 AM – 10:00 AM · Main Stage
- How Anthropic Builds: Lessons from LabsThursday, July 2 · 10:00 AM – 10:20 AM · Main Stage
- Tokens Should Have JobsThursday, July 2 · 10:45 AM – 11:05 AM · Main Stage
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