Realtime multiplayer, automation, and you! — Idan Gazit, GitHub
Summary
The talk introduces two prototypes for future software development: Agentic Workflows and ACE. Agentic Workflows automates complex tasks like dependency upgrades (e.g., Astro 5 to Astro 7) by interpreting plain English instructions into a structured playbook, which is then executed as an action workflow. Crucially, it emphasizes that robust guardrails are defined deterministically in YAML front matter, not merely through prompting. ACE explores real-time multiplayer development in cloud microVMs, treating the shared surface (like Slack) as the primary interface for surfacing non-code facts and collaborative planning.
Key takeaways
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Automation via Plain English Playbooks
5:08
Agentic workflows translate simple natural language instructions (e.g., a message to a junior developer) into comprehensive playbooks that handle tasks like checking for new releases, reviewing changelogs, applying code changes, and creating pull requests.
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Guardrails Must Be Deterministic
6:46
Effective security requires defining guardrails (permissions, allowed tools, network destinations, safe outputs) deterministically in front matter (YAML), rather than relying on prompt instructions, which are susceptible to injection.
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Shifting Development Interface
12:40
The future of development involves iterating on direction and planning within a shared surface (like Slack/ACE), making the document itself—the 'truth'—a primary artifact, rather than solely relying on code.
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AI Augmentation is Not Typing
20:40
A longitudinal study found that hands-on keyboard typing accounts for only about 5% of a developer's time; AI must therefore help scale up the remaining 95% of work (e.g., system design, planning, and collaboration).
Technical details
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Agentic Workflows Architecture
308s
The workflow is defined by a Markdown document (the source code) which gets recompiled into an executable GitHub Actions YAML artifact. The process includes steps for checking dependencies, reviewing release notes, applying upgrades, and verifying the build.
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Security Guardrails Implementation
406s
Guardrails are specified in a dedicated YAML front matter block to deterministically control permissions (e.g., `read all`), allowed tools, network requests (restricting access only to specific domains like NPM ecosystem), and safe outputs (e.g., allowing only 'pull request single').
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ACE Prototype (Multiplayer Dev)
705s
ACE runs sessions in cloud microVMs, ensuring that every session is isolated and not dependent on the local machine. This allows multiple teammates to collaborate on a single repository branch simultaneously.
Mentioned resources
- GitHub Next
- Astro
Channel & topics
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