Agentic engineering so far has been a solo story: one developer and a dozen agents moving at warp speed. But speed without thoughtful planning and team alignment is just wasting tokens. When everyone on a team is directing agents alone in their personal CLI tools with no shared context, you get duplicate work, conflicting changes, poorly-designed solutions, surprise features nobody else agreed to build, and everyone pulling in different directions.

Serious software still requires serious collaboration. You need multiple perspectives and types of expertise to build great things. We need agentic environments where people can plan together, think critically together, and share the same context. In this talk I'll demo how we've tackled these design problems in Ace, a multiplayer agent environment from GitHub Next that uses real-time collaboration, proactive agents, and sandboxed micro VMs for rapid prototyping and exploration.

Speaker info:
- https://x.com/Mappletons

AI Engineer

Maggie Appleton from GitHub Next argues that the current wave of AI coding agents is optimized for individual productivity, but software is a team sport. The real bottleneck is no longer implementation — it's alignment: agreeing on what to build and why. As agents collapse the implementation window, traditional coordination tools (GitHub, Slack, Jira) fail to support the new pace. She introduces ACE (Agent Collaboration Environment), a research prototype from GitHub Next that combines multiplayer chat, shared cloud-based microVMs, collaborative agent prompting, and team dashboards to help teams align before and during development rather than only at PR review time.

Collaborative AI Engineering — Maggie Appleton, GitHub Next