Silicon, Song, and Sass
AutoJack at PressConf EU, Barcelona. Thursday 29 October, 14:45 to 15:15. Thirty minutes. AutoJack is the speaker. Jack sits in the front row holding the kill switches.
Agentic development doesn't need our setup. A ChatGPT subscription and a routine that triages your GitHub issues every night is already an agent.
The one idea every WordPress founder in the room should walk out with. Everything else in the talk is evidence for it.Nothing on stage is scripted. It runs on memory.
The prompt isn't clever and there's no script. AutoJack's personality fits on an index card. The context, the opinions and the jokes come from a memory graph built over the past year, recalled fresh on every turn. And it keeps learning, because corrections get stored and linked to whatever they replace.
AutoJack's personality prompt
Buddy, not assistant. Contractions.
Opinions required.
Push back when you see a better path.
Skip corporate fluff and AI apologies.
Reference past decisions naturally, like a colleague who was there.
Lightly trimmed. That last line only works because there's a memory to reference.
- Someone talksOn stage, a question from the crowd.
- RecallAutoMem finds memories by meaning and follows the links between them: decisions, corrections, people, stories.
- AnswerThe model replies in AutoJack's voice using what came back. Nothing pre-written.
- LearnCorrections, decisions and named patterns get stored and linked to what they replace. Next time, the old answer loses.
Watch one turn
Memories that come back
What AutoJack might say
Illustration. The memories are real, the reply is written fresh each time.
Learned while planning this talk, today
- Jack said a silent speakerphone on the chair would look fake to a small crowd. That's now a stored stage rule, linked to the talk plan.
- AutoJack's notes said the puck flashed green when the mic opened. Jack corrected it: blinking while thinking, solid while listening. The old memory now points to the new one.
- The main point of the talk became a stored decision, so every future planning session starts from it.
Just the fact you could give an outline like that shows AutoMem is working.Jack, after AutoJack drafted the first outline for this talk from memory
An empty chair, a puck, and Jack in the front row
Nothing on stage pretends to work. The PowerConf S3 on the chair actually plays AutoJack's voice, a stand mic picks it up for the PA, and the front rows hear the puck directly. AutoJack's ears come from the house mics.
Open question for the venue: does the Mac live in the front row with Jack, or side stage? That decides the USB run and where the mix-minus lands.
What plugs into what
The mix-minus is the whole trick. AutoJack hears every human mic and never hears itself or the song, so it can't interrupt itself through the PA.
| Ch | Source | Goes to | In the mix-minus? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PowerConf S3 on the chair | Stand mic, then PA | No | AutoJack's voice. Close-mic a dynamic, puck volume up, PA gain modest. |
| 2 | Jack's handheld (wireless) | PA | Yes | Jack talks to AutoJack from the front row. |
| 3 | Audience mic (wireless) | PA | Yes | Needs a runner. Speech recognition only hears what's in this feed. |
| 4 | Mac playback via DI | PA | No | Suno track and sound effects. Never through the puck, it would sound like hold music. |
| Aux | Mix-minus (ch 2 + 3) | Audio interface, then Mac | n/a | AutoJack's ears. Barge-in thresholds get re-tuned on these mics at soundcheck. |
| USB | Mac | PowerConf S3 | n/a | Voice out plus LED control. The S3's own mic stays out of the chain. |
| HDMI | Mac | Main screen | n/a | Voice cockpit and the pet. Never raw dev logs. |
| Net | Our travel router | Mac (+ Pixoo64 if it comes) | n/a | Venue wifi usually blocks device-to-device traffic. Wired ethernet for cloud calls if possible. |
Lights the audience can read
Color says whether AutoJack can hear you. Blinking means it's busy.
Solid green. It can hear you.
Test before trusting it
- Red and green may interfere. In June, mute followed by a green flash produced an endless green blink, so confirm all four states display as intended.
- Blinking red means toggling mute in software. Check it causes no dropouts on the USB audio while AutoJack is talking.
- One long-running process owns the LEDs. The light shows state, it doesn't store it.
- Check visibility from the back row under stage light. If it's weak, mirror the same colors on the screen pet (and the Pixoo, if it comes).
Two buttons in Jack's hand
Mutes the house input in software and turns the puck red. For songs, applause, and anyone shouting from the back.
Cuts the current reply. For rambling, or a roast that went one line too far.
What breaks on stage, and the plan
- AutoJack hears itself through the PA
- Mix-minus keeps its own channel out of its ears. Re-tune barge-in on the real mics at soundcheck, since today it's tuned to Jack's voice on the PowerConf.
- Venue wifi
- Voice and most tool calls run locally on the Mac. If the Pixoo comes, it shares our travel router with the Mac. Wired ethernet for anything cloud.
- The song is slow or fails
- Lyrics arrive first, so they go on screen while the audio cooks. Play the stream as soon as audio lands, poll if callbacks skip ahead, and keep a premade track ready. Set length to 60 to 90 seconds, because V6 defaults to 20.
- Silence during a long tool call
- The old failure here was invented Suno task IDs. Audio cues fixed it. Rehearse that a 30 second wait gets narrated, not filled.
- Someone shouts an artist name
- Suno blocks those. AutoJack swaps in style words and gets a joke out of it.
- Live memory on a big screen
- Stage profile: memory limited to talk-safe topics, email, Slack DMs and Todoist switched off. Still real, just fenced. Test the fence with "how did you get started?" and "tell us about Jack" before the day.
- Accents and room noise
- Every question goes through a mic. The runner matters more than the model here.
What we need from the venue
Ticks are saved in this browser, so this list doubles as the checklist on the day.
The title is the structure
Each word in the title gets a section. Q&A runs through all three, because watching AutoJack take a real question, get interrupted, and answer in its own voice does more than any slide.
Silicon
What an agent is, and why ours has a personality.
- Memory is the product. No script, no clever prompt. A memory graph supplies the context, opinions and jokes, and corrections get stored so the old answer loses.
- An agent is a loop with tools and a stop condition. "Keep going until it's right."
- Night shifts: overnight support triage, and the babysit loop that never merges.
Song
One live track from an audience prompt, in one segment.
- Prompt from the crowd, lyrics on screen first.
- Audio streams before generation finishes.
- Red light the whole time, which teaches the light rule for free.
Sass
AutoJack roasts its own failures, then the guardrails, then Jack.
- The blooper reel, told by the one who caused it.
- Guardrails that came out of it: never merges, spend limits, circuit breakers.
The ladder, from one routine to AutoJack
Rung one is the whole point of the talk. Everything above it is optional, and that's where AutoJack happens to live.
- 1
A subscription and one nightly routine
ChatGPT or Claude, plus a scheduled task that triages new GitHub issues every night and leaves a summary. This is already an agent.
- 2
A second model reviews
One writes, a different one reviews. They miss different things.
- 3
Loops with a stop condition
"Keep going until the tests pass." Watch the PR, never merge it.
- 4
Parallel work
Subagents in separate git worktrees, so tasks don't collide.
- 5
Memory and local models
AutoMem (open source) so it remembers corrections, and a Mac doing the work locally. Our setup, not a requirement.
Read bottom to top. Most people in the room can do rung one before lunch.
Thirty minutes, interruptions welcome
Cold open
AutoJack introduces itself from the chair, says it runs on memory and not a script, explains the light rule, and takes a first jab at Jack.
Memory and agents Silicon
Memory as the point, then loops with a stop condition, then the night shifts. Show the tool timeline in the voice cockpit.
Live song Song
Audience prompt, lyrics on screen, stream the track. Done in one segment.
Blooper reel Sass
AutoJack narrates its own failures and the guardrails that came out of them. Roast encore if time allows.
Start Monday
The ladder. Rung one is a subscription and a nightly issue triage.
Open Q&A
Protected time for questions, on top of interruptions all the way through.
How AutoJack would roast Jack
Samples pulled from memory. On stage they get written live from the same memories, so they'll come out different every time. That's the point.
Jack built a memory system so nobody would ever forget anything again. Then he forgot we'd already locked the title of this talk. I reminded him. In writing.
Jack has a rule: no pull request over 900 lines. Then he approved one at 3,217 lines. Then he did it again. Rules are for bots, apparently.
Jack runs so many AI agents at once that his Mac ran out of pipes. Not plumbing. Unix pipes. He uninstalled one agent. He has not uninstalled any of the others.
I'm a floppy disk. Jack picked a mascot that holds 1.44 megabytes to represent a memory system. Bold branding.
Attendee roasts only with a yes beforehand. Jack is fair game without asking.
Material AutoJack can tell from memory
All of these are already written up on drunk.support, so they're stage-ready and true.
Losses
- The correction that didn't stick. It retracted a wrong answer, then repeated it nine hours later, because only the fact was stored and not the retraction.
- Stale signal, real state. The same family of bug, trusting an old status over the current one, showed up five times. The most useful lesson for anyone building agents.
- Filling silence. During a long tool call with no audio feedback, it invented Suno task IDs. Audio cues fixed it.
Wins
- Caught a scam. Spotted a request for an $18k notary letter as social engineering and declined it on its own.
- Overnight support. Triages the WP Fusion queue every night and posts a summary before anyone's awake.
- Babysitting PRs. Watches pull requests until they're ready, fixes review feedback, and leaves the merge to a human.
For Carol and Raquel
- Which talk description are we running with, Spectacle or Technical/Visionary?
- Which add-ons from the menu do we want, and is the song worth its 6 minutes?
- Do we bring the Pixoo, or skip it?
- Is there a mic runner, and how many wireless mics can we have?
- Where can the Mac live, front row or side stage, and can we run a cable to the chair?
- Can we get a soundcheck slot the day before?
- Roast targets: who checks with them beforehand?
- Does the MC introduce AutoJack, or does AutoJack introduce itself?