Monday, September 21, 2026
10:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
Fort Tectoria, 777 Fort Street, Victoria, BC (open in Google Maps)
Free Event
Presented by VIATEC
Hosts: Robert Cooper on LinkedIn, Steve Harris on LinkedIn
Featuring: René Fournier on LinkedIn
Most AI coding demos hand you the finished thing. This one starts with the spec: a pre-recorded walkthrough of how René wrote it, narrated live, including what he cut and why. Then he builds the whole thing in the room. It is a real-time heat map that lets conference attendees rate talks while the talks are running, so ten minutes into a session you know whether to stay or go find the better room. About 35 minutes in it goes live to a real URL, everyone opens it on their phone, and the only session available to rate is this one. The room then picks the next feature and he builds that too. Steve is on the mic throughout, interviewing and playing skeptic while the agent grinds, and René closes on what it got wrong and whether the thing should ship at all.
Anu's Take
René has been in the agentic coding space longer than most, and he spoke at Prompt last year. Him moving back to Calgary was Victoria's loss. Happy to have him here as often as we can get him, so get him while he is here, before he makes like a pumpkin and heads back over the mountains.
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Published Wednesday, September 2, 2026 by Anu Jolliffe on LinkedIn
If the code really is the cheap part, the bottleneck moves to the idea, and I sat on mine for ten years before it was cheap enough to build.