
Ben Brandt
Ben Brandt works at Zed, helping shape how engineers collaborate with AI and with each other. He is also a Lead Maintainer of the Agent Client Protocol, an open standard for interoperability between editors and coding agents.
Zed, Germanybenbrandt
Friends Don’t Let Friends Agent Alone
Friends Don’t Let Friends Agent Alone

This talk is about what gets unlocked when engineers pair with each other and an agent, instead of disappearing into silos with one human and one machine. We never paired to type. We paired to stay aligned, challenge assumptions, and make better decisions together. When code gets cheap to produce, the human collaboration layer matters more, not less. We'll explore what effective human+agent collaboration actually looks like in practice and you'll leave with a framework for keeping teams aligned without slowing them down.