Your Next User Isn't Human: Building for the Agentic World in Python

Somewhere right now, an AI agent is trying to use your software. It is reading your documentation, calling your API, and sometimes scraping your UI when there is no better option. Whether you designed for it or not, agents are becoming a new class of software user. This shift changes how we think about interfaces. If you are building agentic products, one of the most important design decisions is how your agent interacts with the outside world: function calling, MCP, CLI access, SDKs, or code execution. Each approach makes different trade-offs in precision, composability, reliability, and cost. Choose the wrong interface and an agent can struggle to use your tools effectively, even when the underlying capabilities are sound. But this is not only a problem for teams building agents. If you build APIs, platforms, or developer tools, agents are changing what it means to have a usable interface. Just as mobile forced software teams to rethink interfaces around a new computing paradigm, agents are creating a new interface layer built around MCP servers, CLIs, SDKs, structured schemas, and code execution environments. In this talk, I’ll break down these interface patterns with live Python examples, moving from schema-based tool calling to MCP servers and code-as-action. Drawing on lessons from building Nansen’s production AI agent, which handles more than 120,000 queries per month, I’ll show how these patterns behave in real-world systems and where each approach fits. You’ll leave with a practical framework for deciding which interface to build for an agent, along with concrete principles for making your APIs, documentation, docstrings, schemas, and error messages more agent-ready. Whether you build agents or build the software they need to use, the interface layer is changing. This talk is about understanding that layer and designing for it deliberately.
Format: TECHNICAL TALK
Location: ROOM B
Speakers: Shahid Kandy
Level: Intermediate
Audience: Registered participants