Operating at the Edge: What Extreme Environments Teach Us About AI Systems

This talk is confirmed. The time of the talk will be announced soon.

The recording will be published after editing. Multipass and Full ticket holders have early access.

AI has made building software faster, but it has also quietly changed the environment engineers are operating in. Responsibility hasn’t disappeared; it has concentrated. Decisions are harder to trace, failures are harder to localize, and humans remain accountable inside systems they no longer fully control.

Drawing from experience designing systems for extreme environments, where visibility is limited, failure cascades, and human limits must be designed for, this talk reframes AI-assisted development as an operational challenge, not a tooling one. It introduces a different lens: treating AI-driven systems as architecture that must be operated like extreme environments, instead of faster versions of normal ones.

This talk has been presented at React Summit 2026, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

design systems

Michal Ziso

Video transcription, chapters and summary will be available later.

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