Agent Management &
Engineering Habits
The bottleneck has moved. Agents can now take action on your behalf, and the people who know how to manage them well will pull ahead. This Christchurch AI meetup is about the next layer of AI capability: not just using tools, but scoping, supervising, and improving agentic systems in real work.
The Talks
Agent Management: The Next High-Value Skillset
Caelan Huntress — AI Coaching Academy
As agentic systems become more capable, our advantage will not come from technical proficiency alone. It will come from knowing how to scope agentic projects, manage autonomous systems, evaluate their performance, and design the information environments that make them effective.
Caelan will unpack what AI agents are, how they differ from simple chat tools, which skills matter when agents start taking action, what tools can be used to build agent harnesses, and why context engineering and performance evaluation are becoming core capabilities.
Agent Habits with an Engineer's Mindset
Blake Burgess — Senior Engineer
What are AI agents, really, and what can they actually do? Blake brings 20 years of programming experience to a motivational, practical walkthrough of agents in practice — from local agents to cloud agents, explained simply.
Expect a grounded engineer's perspective on harnesses, models, and where agents fit into existing workflows without rebuilding everything. You'll leave with practical habits and hooks you can start using straight away.
Who Should Come
- Proficient AI users who want to level up into agentic workflows
- Team leaders and decision-makers evaluating agent opportunities
- Developers and technical operators building useful harnesses around models
- Professionals curious about where agents fit into everyday work
Format
Drinks and networking from 5:30 PM. Talks run from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM, followed by open Q&A and more conversation until 8:00 PM. Sponsored by AI Coaching Academy.