GopherCon 2026
Table of Contents
- 1. Overview
- 2. Workshops (Tue Aug 4)
- 2.1. Agents the Hard Way: Building Agentic Systems in Go — Johnny Boursiquot
- 2.2. Agentic Go Development: Orchestrate AI to Work Like You — Cory LaNou
- 2.3. Ultimate Practical AI — Florin Pățan (Ardan Labs)
- 2.4. Ultimate Private AI — Bill Kennedy (Ardan Labs)
- 2.5. Go Concurrency: Debugging Goroutines and Channels — Derek Parker
- 2.6. Profiling and Optimizing Go Programs — Cory LaNou
- 2.7. Security Threat Modeling for Go Developers — Benji Vesterby
- 3. Talks (Wed-Thu Aug 5-6)
- 4. Cross-cutting Themes
- 5. Related
1. Overview
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Dates | – |
| Venue | Seattle Convention Center, Summit |
| Hotel | Hyatt Regency Seattle |
| URL | gophercon.com |
| Sessions | 70 total (workshops, talks, lightning talks, meetups) |
| Keynote | Steve Francia — "Why Not Go?" |
2. Workshops (Tue Aug 4)
2.1. Agents the Hard Way: Building Agentic Systems in Go — Johnny Boursiquot
Half-day (AM and PM sessions). Framework-free agentic systems in Go. Agents as goal-driven state machines, LLM as constrained decision component. Skills as capability boundaries backed by local Go functions or MCP tools. Guardrails for infinite loops, hallucinated actions, runaway costs. Requires OpenAI/Anthropic/Bedrock account + Ollama.
2.2. Agentic Go Development: Orchestrate AI to Work Like You — Cory LaNou
Half-day PM. Configure Claude Code and Codex to follow conventions, build custom skills, set up hooks for automated validation. Complete issue-to-PR workflow using trained agents.
2.3. Ultimate Practical AI — Florin Pățan (Ardan Labs)
Full-day. RAG in Go, tool calling, MCP server implementation, speculative decoding, semantic caching, model routing, LLM security (prompt injection, exfiltration). Build a complete AI application from prompt to production.
2.4. Ultimate Private AI — Bill Kennedy (Ardan Labs)
Full-day. Pure-Go local inference with Yzma/Kronk (llama.cpp, no CGO). Build your own model server with OpenAI-compatible API. Requires Mac M1 16GB+ or GPU with 8GB+ VRAM.
2.5. Go Concurrency: Debugging Goroutines and Channels — Derek Parker
Half-day AM. Race detector, tracing tool, Delve debugger. Fix real concurrency bugs in real time.
2.6. Profiling and Optimizing Go Programs — Cory LaNou
Half-day AM. pprof, benchmarking, torch graphs, common performance mistakes.
2.7. Security Threat Modeling for Go Developers — Benji Vesterby
Half-day PM. STRIDE framework, attack trees, credential compromise analysis. Assumed breach scenario on a real Go web application.
3. Talks (Wed-Thu Aug 5-6)
3.1. Highlights
| Time | Speaker | Talk | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wed 9:05 | (Go Team) | Towards Go 1.∞ | Language direction |
| Wed 9:35 | Naoki Kuroda | Loosening the Reins: Generics Get More Flexible | Generic type aliases, recursive constraints |
| Wed 10:05 | Cassie Coyle | Go and AI Save the Bees | Workflows + AI APIs, real distributed system |
| Wed 11:15 | Casey Manus | Self-Optimizing Worker Pools | PID controllers + ML for pool tuning |
| Wed 11:45 | Mikayla Toffler | Receipts from the Go Linker | Dead code elimination, dependency cost |
| Wed 12:15 | George Adams | Go Inside Microsoft | Scale, security, upstream collaboration |
| Wed 2:20 | Alexander Baygeldin | Synctesting Concurrent Code | testing/synctest package |
| Wed 2:50 | — | Reimagining Plan 9 for WebAssembly | Plan 9 + Wasm |
| Wed 4:15 | Oscar Villavicencio | Pure-Go Tree-sitter | AI-assisted parser, parity harness |
| Wed 5:15 | Jake Bailey | State of TypeScript 7: Beyond the Port | TS compiled to Go, snapshot LSP, Wasm |
| Thu 9:05 | (Go Team) | Go Cryptography State of the Union | Crypto roadmap |
| Thu 9:35 | Dylan Bourque | What slog Left on the Table | Dynamic per-component log levels |
| Thu 10:05 | Sunny Young | Parsing Protobuf as Fast as Possible | hyperpb parser VM |
| Thu 11:45 | Achille Roussel | Sandboxing DuckDB with io/fs | C library I/O through Go runtime |
| Thu 2:20 | — | Uber-Scale Changes: Millions of Lines of Go | Large-scale code transformation |
| Thu 4:15 | — | Lua VM in Pure Go | Register-based VM implementation |
| Thu 4:45 | Samantha Coyle | Durable Agent & MCP Execution Engine | Deterministic replay, checkpoint resumption |
| Thu 5:15 | Steve Francia | Why Not Go? (Keynote) | Language decision framework |
4. Cross-cutting Themes
4.1. Agentic systems are the headline
Three workshops and two talks directly address AI agents in Go:
- Boursiquot: agents as state machines + MCP (workshop)
- LaNou: Claude Code + Codex orchestration (workshop)
- Pățan: full-stack RAG + MCP server (workshop)
- Coyle (Thu): durable MCP execution engine
- Bailey: TypeScript 7 compiled to Go (the compiler itself is an agent substrate)
4.2. MCP is production infrastructure
MCP appears in three sessions. It's no longer experimental — it's how Go programs expose tools to AI agents. The "Durable Agent & MCP Execution Engine" talk addresses the crash-recovery problem that every production MCP deployment faces.
4.3. TypeScript 7 compiled to Go
Jake Bailey's talk is the follow-up to the TS-to-Go port announcement. Snapshot-based language server, cross-language IPC, and Wasm target. Directly relevant to the Paris TypeScript #47 prep on tsgo/Corsa.
5. Related
- Go research — language features, compilation, ecosystem
- EDA + Actor Model — Go channels as lightweight actors (2026 update)
- CLI Coding Agents Q2 — Go-based agents (Codex CLI, OpenCode)
- Agent Memory Systems — JITIR, memory architectures
- Paris TypeScript #47 — tsgo/Corsa context for Bailey's talk
- Tech Week Boston — same summer, different coast
- ICFP 2026 — same month (Aug 24-29, Indianapolis)