As AI agents move from experimental to production, engineers must solve critical challenges in context management, deterministic verification, and security. This overview provides a roadmap for building reliable, agentic systems while maintaining robust supply chain integrity.
I’m looking for ideas I can take back to my own work, from verifying agent-written code and securing dependencies to building software that works where internet access is unreliable.
There are more sessions at GitHub Universe than I can fit into two days. To narrow the list, I built my agenda around questions I’m working through right now:
That puts agent memory, evaluations, and permissions high on my list. I’m also making room for JavaScript tooling and building software where internet access is unreliable. Here are my 10 picks.
Most of us use npm, but the truth is that many of us rarely stop to think about the people, permissions, and release processes behind the packages it pulls in. Karen Li and Leo Balter from GitHub will trace those dependencies through the systems that publish and protect them. I’m interested in what npm audit can’t catch, and where package provenance and OpenID Connect fit into the picture.
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GitHub researchers Cooper Nederhood and Alejandro Carderera built a benchmark from sequences of real pull requests and found that accumulated context can hurt performance. We expend a lot of effort deciding what context to give an agent. I want to understand what to not give. They’ll cover how that research informs their work on agent memory, including features still in development.
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You’ve written instructions, built and installed skills, and added your MCP servers. It works for you. How do you make that context useful across a team? Christopher Harrison from GitHub will break down what each tool is good for and how to distribute the right context consistently as your setup grows.
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“Open a pull request, but do not merge” is a boundary I want enforced in permissions. Putting it in an instructions file feels like an inadequate setup. Nick Taylor from Pomerium will demonstrate an identity-aware proxy that adds per-identity authorization in front of a hosted MCP server without changing the upstream server. I want to see how the rule holds up when an agent actually tries to act.
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A model can score well on a benchmark and still disappoint developers using it. Walker Chabbott from GitHub and Julia Kasper from Microsoft will show how Copilot evaluates models in production, including what the team measures and what they stopped measuring. Metrics help us and models make real decisions, so understanding what to measure is more important than ever. This session is a Sandbox Session, so I’m looking forward to working through the question of what makes an evaluation useful.
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The test passed so why is the app still broken? Safe to say we’ve all been there. Jeff An from Momentic will explore how agents investigate applications, reproduce unexpected behavior, and distinguish product bugs from broken tests or infrastructure failures. I’m especially interested in the deterministic controls that limit what those agents can do while they investigate.
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In the architecture Achin Gupta from Intuit and Divya Mahajan from Amazon will present, deterministic code handles signal collection, topology traversal, correlation, and scoring. The language model narrates the evidence. That’s a clear split of responsibilities, and I want to understand the decisions behind it.
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A workflow with access to credentials and the ability to publish a release is an attractive target. Steve Glass and Greg Ose from GitHub will map supply chain attack techniques to GitHub Actions controls, covering the ecosystem, workflow attack surface, and runner infrastructure. I want a clearer picture of where to put defenses in a pipeline I’d trust with a release.
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“Your entire JavaScript toolchain” is a bold statement. I’m glad this session includes a real migration. Alexander Lichter from VoidZero will walk through Vite+, an open source CLI for managing the front-end toolchain. Bundling, testing, linting, formatting, runtime management: there’s plenty of configuration in that list. I want to see what Vite+ replaces today, what I’d need to manage separately, and what’s on the roadmap.
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Alex Junior Antwi from Braveon AI will share lessons from building CarbonSight for low-connectivity communities in Ghana. There is a long list of concerns when building for less-than-ideal connectivity scenarios, and shouldn’t we all build for our least-connected users? I’m very excited about the offline demo on this one.
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I’ll also join Shishir Tewari from Procore for Build once, run on any agent: a practical guide to agent skills. I’ll bring the skills I’ve built for recurring work; Shishir will bring his experience building skills for a production data engineering team. We’ll explore when a workflow belongs in a reusable skill. If you’re tired of repeating yourself to your coding agent and want to understand what makes a skill useful in both your work and personal projects, come join us.
Want to see what else is happening at Universe? Think about the topics you are prioritizing, then check out the rest of the schedule here and add sessions to your agenda. And if you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time to pick up in-person or virtual passes. I hope to see you there October 28–29!
The post 10 technical talks I’m excited about at GitHub Universe 2026 appeared first on The GitHub Blog.
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