AI Engineer Melbourne: two days I'm still processing
Two days volunteering at AI Engineer Melbourne. The energy, the conversations, the humbling realisation of how much there is still to learn, and the privilege of being amongst people with real investment in where AI is going.
I was a volunteer at AI Engineer Melbourne this week. Two days helping John Allsopp and his team run an incredible event like clockwork. I got to meet a whole bunch of interesting people, had conversations that genuinely shifted how I'm thinking about several things, and left feeling like the whole experience was an absolute blur.
The energy in that building was something else. Everyone there had real investment in where AI is going, and being amongst that collective excitement was something I won't forget in a hurry.
One of the things I took away is how much I don't know. That's a humbling realisation, particularly after the last six months where I feel like I've learned more than in any other period of my career. December 2025 feels like a decade ago with clock time only on its second season. The pace of change is compressing time in a way that's hard to describe until it's experienced firsthand.
The organisations implementing AI within their operations are doing so at a pace that would have been unrecognisable a year ago. Training, retraining, reskilling, and reorienting to a new way of doing things. Software developers are becoming managers of agents, and that shift is changing everything. How teams work. How management structures those teams. How leaders figure out the best way to organise the work to get the most out of both the people and the technology. Nobody has a finished playbook for this yet, and watching so many different approaches in one place made that beautifully clear.
Being able to do so much more increases both the realm of possibility and risk. All sides of the spectrum were covered across the two days: productivity, engagement, happiness, learning, security, token burn, token efficiency, orchestration, inference cost, open models, open weights, frontier models, harness engineering, and the list goes on. The breadth of expertise shared at this conference was almost overwhelming, and all of it delivered in eighteen minute blocks run like clockwork.
There's so much to think about. I suspect it will bubble up through my thinking over the next few weeks, surfacing in conversations and decisions and the work I'm doing with clients. For now I'm still processing.
It was a fantastic event. I feel privileged to have been a part of it.