BugBash 2026

Basics

Field Value
Dates <2026-04-22 Wed>–<2026-04-24 Fri>
Venue Eaton DC, 1201 K St NW, Washington, DC 20005
Host Antithesis
URL lu.ma/bugbash2026
Capacity ~200 (curated)
Framing Software correctness — testing, formal methods, SRE

Program

  • Apr 22 (seminars): Kyle Kingsbury, Mark Logan, Nada Amin & Fernanda Graciolli, Jacopo Tagliabue.
  • Apr 23: Will Wilson (Antithesis), Deb Chachra (Olin), Peter Alvaro (UCSC), Ron Minsky (Jane Street), Ben Eggers (OpenAI).
  • Apr 24: Ankush Desai (Snowflake), Brian Potter (IFP), Steve Klabnik, Gabriela Moreira (Informal Systems).

Speaker lineup per host at time of writing; subject to revision.

Why

The conference sits at the intersection of three things under active construction here: deterministic execution contracts, provenance as first-class infrastructure, and the seven-layer agentic stack. Antithesis, Jane Street, and Informal Systems operate at the substrate that elenctic-spec and pitcrew try to externalize. Alvaro's CALM, Desai's P, and Amin's dependent types are the formal anchors for what the rest of the stack does informally.

Refutation

If the trip yields no updated priors on any of CALM/monotonicity · lineage-as-playbook-trace · P/DST vs aq gossip · dependent types for spec progression · formal contracts for agent governance — the mapping below was wrong about which terms carry weight in this specific room. Post-mortem in bugbash-2026-debrief.org.

Speaker × concern mapping

Seven Concerns layers L1 (Substrate) through L7 (Coordination). Mapping is forecast, not observed — revision expected.

Speaker Work Concern Claim under test
Peter Alvaro CALM, lineage L2, L4 Lineage is playbook trace, not audit
Nada Amin Dependent types, metaprogramming L3, L4 elenctic-spec L0→L3 is type-level refinement
Kyle Kingsbury Jepsen L4, L5 Fault injection before contract ≠ useful
Ankush Desai P language, DST L3, L5 aq gossip needs P-style invariants
Ron Minsky Jane Street OCaml L1, L6 Provenance as language primitive
Frank McSherry Differential dataflow L2 Retrieval-as-dataflow, not RAG
Gabriela Moreira Quint / TLA+ L3 Spec refinement has a type signature
Chaitanya Bhandari DST L5 Determinism is a governance tuple
Will Wilson Antithesis L5 Hypervisor determinism composes upward
Deb Chachra Infrastructure L1, L6 Software borrows its failure modes

Companion artifacts

  • shapeshifting-l4-provenance-contract.org — Digital Shapeshifting (Tao, Kumar, Pace, jw, 2025) ↔ Agent Execution Contract ↔ Seven Concerns L4. PAT-based delegation as provenance tuple [persona:agent:reviewer@env(project:workspace)].
  • eng-metrics-saas-landscape.org — DORA / SPACE / Developer Thriving, anchored against the Grafana & Friends Boston and Postman State of the API 2025 meetups. Foil for reliability-as-practice vs reliability-as-vendor-category.

Aporia

  • Speaker lineup is published, not final. Alvaro absence collapses the CALM row.
  • "Hallway beats keynote" is untested in this format. A 200-seat vendor-hosted conference has different dynamics than a research workshop. If the room is mostly Antithesis prospects, the mapping describes talks watched, not conversations had.
  • The Seven Concerns forecast assumes speakers recognize the layering. They didn't write it. Expect puzzled looks on L4 specifically.
  • "Correctness conference" is the host's framing. If it reads as "reliability-vendor conference" in practice, the eng-metrics landscape doc updates accordingly.

Related

Author: jwalsh

jwalsh@nexus

Last Updated: 2026-04-18 23:23:22

build: 2026-04-19 13:59 | sha: 107ee45