Its own framing, from the homepage:

There's no other event like this -- a conference for engineers by engineers,
where we'll share novel approaches for solving complex problems efficiently
and at speed. Vendor and tool agnostic, this conference will be for a highly
technical audience only. Your boss's boss is not invited.

The CFP adds the constraint that makes the vendor-neutrality claim testable: "It's vendor-neutral, and we don't allow shallow overviews or product pitches." Talks are 15–20 minutes.

A conference about tail latency has put coding with agents in both day-one keynote slots and the day-two opener. That is the finding, and it is about where the subject has landed rather than about any single talk.

• Effective Coding and Working with Agents — Chip Huyen, author of AI Engineering. On making "the most out of working with multiple agents".
• Hardwood: Building a Parquet Parser From Scratch (With a Little Help From AI) — Gunnar Morling, Confluent. The abstract names the tool: "practical learnings from using AI (specifically, Claude Code) as a coding companion".
• How to Improve Your Cache Algorithm Using AI — Dor Laor, ScyllaDB's CEO, opening day two. "Everybody knows that AI can code. It can also convert your code to Rust. But can AI write a database? … my journey of 'vibe coding' the ScyllaDB cache to implement an alternative LRU algorithm and improve our p99 latency."

Roughly eighteen of sixty-two talks touch AI. Two are close enough to the work here to be worth the timeslot.

61 talks from the homepage featured-speaker list, read 2026-10-08, co-presenters merged. Day and slot per talk are not recorded here: the list carries none, and the full agenda grid has not been re-read since 2026-09-26. The agenda counted 62; the one-talk gap is unreconciled.

The Related here column links a note on this site. A plain link means the note covers the talk's named subject. "guess:" means the overlap is inferred from the title alone. A blank means nothing here is close.

The talks with the most overlap with work here, beyond the two agent-in-production talks above. Where an abstract has not been read, the entry says so and stops at the title.

p99conf.io/on-demand carries 264 session pages spanning 2021 through 2025, filterable by year, type and topic, each with abstract, speaker bio and slides. Ungated — an attendee quote the site chooses to display reads "Videos available on-demand afterwards with no gating or games."

For a conference whose talks are recorded in advance anyway, the archive rather than the live event is the artifact. ScyllaDB also runs a separate gated on-demand landing page for 2025, which is worth knowing before handing over an email.

Recorded because a reader planning around this page would hit them.

• The UTC conversion is wrong. The site says "8:00am – 1:00pm Pacific Time / 16:00 – 20:00 UTC". October Pacific is UTC-7, so 08:00 PT is 15:00 UTC, not 16:00. Sessionize's own timezone field says UTC-07. Unchanged on 2026-10-08: the page still pairs 08:00–13:00 Pacific with 16:00–20:00 UTC. Pacific Daylight Time makes it 15:00–20:00 UTC; the end is right and the start is an hour late. Recorded as found.
• The stated hours exclude a whole track. "8:00am – 1:00pm" on both days, while the grid schedules nine day-two sessions from 01:00 to 03:55 Pacific for Europe, Asia and India. Day two actually runs about 01:00 to 12:35.
• "Full agenda will be announced soon" still sits on the homepage while /agenda/ renders a complete two-day, three-stage grid.
• Three talks carry different titles on the homepage and in the agenda, including one where the vector count differs — 1B on the homepage, 100M in the abstract.
• The lower speaker wall is a legacy reel. Andy Pavlo, Michael Stonebraker, Gil Tene, Liz Rice, Charity Majors and others appear with bios and no 2026 talk. They are past speakers used as social proof and read as this year's lineup.
• One talk exists only on the homepage — Catherine Jue of KERNEL on "building crazy fast, open source infrastructure for AI agents", with sub-30ms browser boot times — and appears nowhere in the agenda feed. It is still on the homepage list on 2026-10-08; the feed was not re-checked.
• 61 featured, 62 scheduled. The homepage list read on 2026-10-08 has 61 talks against the 62 the agenda grid held on 2026-09-26. Which one is missing from which list is not established.

Direct: the note covers the talk's named subject, and carries a Seen at link back.

• Agent Sandbox Architectures — Lovable, Unikraft: sandbox lifecycle and boot cost.
• Performance Engineering Tools Reference — Den Odell, whose book it maps; Tanel Poder and the other eBPF talks; Tracegrams and Salesforce on distributed tracing; HERE and Stax on profiling; the Valkey talk against its caching section.
• The Oracle Is the Deliverable — Netflix: canary results, not model confidence, as the oracle an autonomous agent is graded by.
• Context Surfaces — Redis: profiles exposed to an agent over MCP.
• Python Priority Queues with heapq — the SimdQuickHeap talk in the databases table.

One-way, because crowsnest is a versioned spec rather than a research note:

• crowsnest OTLP ingest — Tracegrams, Salesforce. The receiver stores every span; both talks are about not doing that at scale.

Guesses, inferred from a title or a one-line abstract, with no back-link:

• Agentic Software Engineering — Chip Huyen.
• The Oracle Is the Deliverable — Perfloop, Disney+/Hulu's AI-driven optimization, Dor Laor's AI-written cache.
• Rebuilding from the spec — Gunnar Morling's Parquet parser built with Claude Code.
• Context Surfaces — The Prompt is the Platform.
• Agent Sandbox Architectures — KERNEL.
• Sandboxing AI Coding Agents with FreeBSD Jails — Lovable; a jail lives per agent, a Lovable cell per prompt.
• Serverless Architecture — Unikraft, on cold starts.
• Agent Telemetry Systems — Tracegrams.
• TLA+ for System Design — American Express, and AWS on optimistic concurrency and precise time.
• pocket-es — Vectorless RAG and the ScyllaDB full-text benchmark; pocket-es is BM25 with no vectors.
• Qwen3.6 and the KV Cache Constraint — Fearless Quantization.

Rejected after reading: bac and P-99 (the name is Ninety-Nine Prolog Problems, not a percentile); caching (HTTP and CDN caching, not eviction algorithms); functools (lru_cache usage only); Go (no execution-tracer content); racket-treelist, faster-simpler-red-black-trees and representing-sets (no hashing or heap content); agent-sandbox-practical-configs (jail and Seatbelt configuration, not boot cost). Nothing here covers io_uring, eBPF beyond the tools reference, unikernel images, Parquet, QUIC or vector indexes.

• p99conf.io — server-rendered; the homepage carries the speaker list and abstracts
• CFP — closed 29 May 2026; carries the track list verbatim
• On-demand archive, 2021–2025
• 2025 recap — "the fifth in this incredible series", titled Latency to LLMs