They don't make them like this anymore | Knut Melvær<br>I went to CascadiaJS half-expecting either AI hype or AI fatigue. I found neither, just a room full of working developers, quietly unsure, but building new things with a very familiar mindset. Some musings ensue.

First one to find me and send the photo with me circled gets some sanity swag 🤞ContentsWhat the room felt like<br>Working with agents: mental models and frameworks<br>The work didn't disappear; It moved up and down the abstraction layer<br>Knowing the layer underneath is the edge<br>English is great, but programming languages still matter<br>The tinkerer isn't going anywhere<br>Question everything<br>The only thing left to do is say thanks<br>tl;dr: CascadiaJS is a rare developer conference that does not make you feel like you’re in a sponsor funnel. Go if you can. It was also a refreshing reminder that yes, AI has changed a lot of things, but it still require somewhat of a engineer’s mindset to make the stuff actually work.<br>It's not very often I get to be “just” an attendee. Having worked devrel in various permutations at Sanity for eight years, most developer conferences come with a booth to run, a sponsor badge, a workshop or a talk to give. So now that I've moved to California, I finally got to take a short flight to Seattle for CascadiaJS. One of those conferences I kept hearing good things about and had wanted to go to for a while.<br>It lived up to expectations.<br>Events always come with a vibe. Go to the big ones and you often feel like you're being treated as a potential email for a sponsor's list, and it takes all the extroverted energy you can muster to strike up a conversation with a fellow attendee. CascadiaJS feels more like a company offsite (in a good way). You might not know everyone, but you can be pretty confident a good conversation is one hello away. And if you've been around, you probably already know a few faces from the Internet there already.<br>I was curious what kind of conversations I'd have at a non-Bay-Area tech conference in 2026. Surely every talk and every chat would be about AI, right? RIGHT?<br>Turns out, yes. A little. But not in the way I expected.<br>#What the room felt like<br>I came braced for one of two things. The hype, everyone breathless, agents everywhere, ship your job to a swarm. Tokenmaxxing. Or the backlash in a room of holdouts rolling their eyes. I found neither.<br>What I found instead was quieter and more honest. No one I talked to were questioning AI for coding anymore. But the confidence that some of the talks projected wasn’t really in the hallway. We’re all still poking at it, trying to figure out how to make all of this stuff best work for us (and not the other way around).<br>Almost everyone I talked to is somewhere in the middle of figuring it out, and nobody seemed sure. A PM at a big hardware company, building a lot with AI, feeling empowered. A developer at a major news publisher thinking hard about engagement and subscriptions now that Google is quietly taking their traffic. Agency folks now meeting heightened expectations to ship faster. Folks trying to get into the industry again or for the first time. All in, but feeling their way.<br>I asked some of the younger attendees, folks barely out of university, how they felt about all of it. Some hesitation, but mostly a shared sense that the level of abstraction has gone up and that understanding the layer underneath still matters for knowing how to nudge these things in the right direction.<br>And yeah, everyone is also waiting for the subsidized tokens to go away and for the field to have a bit of a rude awaking and heightened expectations on the returns of invested tokens.<br>#Working with agents: mental models and frameworks<br>Netlify’s Matt Biilmann’s opening keynote gave the room a clear way to think about Agent Experience: designing your product for the agents that use it on a user's behalf, not just for the humans. His four pillars are Access (can an agent get in and authenticate), Context (does it understand what your product is and does), Tools (are you giving it the right interfaces, not just your human-facing ones), and Orchestration (can agents be launched and run from your product). Great DX isn't automatically great AX. An interactive CLI is a delight for a human and a wall for an agent. Netlify has an obvious interest in AX becoming table stakes, but the framework is a good one to think with regardless.<br>The tension between developer and agent experience is the part I've spent a lot of the year writing about, so I'll point rather than repeat it all. I've argued that agentic developer experience starts with your system, not your prompts (where I push on Matt's framework a little, on the question of sequencing, which pillar you invest in first when you only have one sprint), and I've tried to extend the same thinking into ten laws of developer experience for CMSes.<br>I missed some talks for the hallway track and and a fantastic taco lunch, so take this as a partial read, but there...