Welcome to the first edition of the AI Engineer World’s Fair newspaper!
On behalf of the organizing team, I’m delighted to welcome you to AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026, and to thank MLH and DEV for helping make this newspaper possible.
There are multiple personal full-circle moments here for me.
Ten years ago, at a conference very much like this one, I began my developer writing career on DEV because of a writing challenge they inspired. My first blog post was about a conference talk: what I heard, what I learned, and what I wanted to remember. That habit of writing in public has shaped my career, my learning, my friendships, my opportunities, and, in a very real way, my life. So my first encouragement to you is simple: Write things down. Share what you learned, restate things in your own words, construct new insights by contrast and comparison. Not only because it helps your public profile, though it does, but because reflection is good for the soul (and changing the trajectory of your career).
Three years ago today, I wrote down “The Rise of the AI Engineer,” because of a very simple observation that engineers would both be enabled by AI and would be uniquely able to explore the capability overhang far more effectively than “prompt engineers” on one hand, or, more controversially, “ML engineers” on the other. Since then, the thesis bore out: Everyone from top YC startups to the Metas, OpenAIs, and Anthropics of the world are building out multibillion-dollar AI Engineering/Forward Deployed Engineering orgs and saying “the model alone is no longer the product,” agentic models and the neoclouds/“AI Clouds” have drastically shifted compute workloads from training to inference and sandboxing, and prompt engineering gave way to rigorous evals, RL environments for post-training, and context/harness engineering. While there’s a new shiny thing every month, the fundamentals of both great product/software taste and ML intuition are more needed than ever, so we set out to build a home that is both timely and timeless.
