BugBash 2026
Basics
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Dates | |
| Venue | Eaton DC, 1201 K St NW, Washington, DC 20005 |
| Host | Antithesis |
| URL | antithesis.com/bugbash |
| 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. Linked names go to the talk recording; see Recordings for the full playlist, including talks not listed here.
Recordings
Bug Bash 2026 playlist on YouTube, 23 videos, in playlist order.
Not in the Program list above: Frank McSherry and Chaitanya Bhandari (both in the mapping), Matt Barrett, corwin, Pierre Zemb, Anish Agarwal, Niklas Gögge, Lukas Käldstrom, Dominik Czarnota, Shivanish Vij, Josh Ip, Jenny Qu, Oskar Wickström, Fernanda Graciolli's solo talk, and the Gary Marcus conversation.
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) and Agent Execution Contract and 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-metricslandscape doc updates accordingly.