Agents Without Code: How Skills, YAML, and Filesystems Replaced Python
Philipp Schmid
- When
- Thursday, July 23:45 PM – 4:05 PM · 20 min
- Where
- Main StageSan Francisco, CA · imported from ai.engineer's public schedule feed
About this session
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).
Speaker
Staff Engineer, Google DeepMind
Philipp Schmid is a Staff Engineer at Google DeepMind working on Gemini and Gemma. His work focuses on helping developers build and benefit from AI responsibly.
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