Founder of AI Engineer community and Latent Space podcast (Top 10 US Tech, 2M+ listeners). Creator of Smol AI, building LLM-powered research agents. Previously led developer experience at AWS, Netlify, Temporal, and Airbyte. Now at Cognition AI.
Community Builder & Quality Advocate
Swyx has become one of the most influential voices in AI engineering, not through research papers, but by building essential infrastructure for practitioners: communities, conferences, and content platforms that bridge the gap between cutting-edge capabilities and real-world implementation.
Current Work
As founder and organizer of AI Engineer, swyx runs the annual AI Engineer Summit and maintains active community channels for practitioners. The conference has become a key gathering place for engineers building production AI systems.
Co-hosting Latent Space podcast with Alessio, swyx has built one of the most influential AI engineering media properties. The show features founders and researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, and other frontier labs, achieving over 2 million listeners in 2024.
Through Smol AI Company, swyx demonstrates practical AI agent applications by producing AI News, an industry newsletter that’s 99% created by customizable research agents. The company raised $3M pre-seed.
Writes actively at swyx.io, covering AI engineering practices, developer experience, and the evolution of AI tooling.
Background
Previously led developer experience at major tech companies including AWS, Two Sigma, Netlify, Temporal, and Airbyte. Known for making complex AI concepts accessible to working engineers and for prolific content creation across blogs, livestreams, and social media. As of 2025, swyx joined Cognition AI (makers of Devin), while continuing independent work on AI Engineer and Latent Space.
Philosophy on War on Slop
At the 2025 AI Engineer Code Summit, swyx delivered opening remarks centered on “declaring war on slop” - a call to engineering excellence in an era of cheap generation.
Slop vs. Kino - Slop represents low-quality AI-generated content lacking substance; Kino represents high-quality, carefully crafted work that differentiates as generation becomes cheap.
Engineering Excellence - Advocated for code maps (visual representations of code) as cognitive tools to fight slop through clarity, emphasizing engineers bear responsibility for what gets built and shipped.
Community Standards - Called for the AI engineering community to collectively establish higher standards and hold each other accountable for quality.
Influence
Swyx represents practitioner-led thought leadership, organizing communities by and for engineers rather than academia or VC narratives. Through Latent Space, swyx has interviewed leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Sierra, tiny, Databricks, Modular, and Answer.ai. His work emphasizes quality over hype, accessibility without oversimplification, community infrastructure as a public good, and open dialogue willing to challenge prevailing narratives.
Conference Appearance
Event: AI Engineering Code Summit 2025 Date: November 21, 2025 Time: 9:06 AM - 9:10 AM Session: Opening Remarks, Day 2
Delivered call to action on “declaring war on slop,” emphasizing quality as the differentiator in an age of cheap generation. Introduced code maps as tools for fighting mediocrity through clarity and comprehension.