Wrangling Shoggoths: AI Agents for Fast Development of our Escape Room

For KubeCon Amsterdam, we hosted a first-of-its-kind escape room party, featuring a custom Amsterdam-themed browser-based escape room. While this was great fun, it was also a massive amount of work to be done in a short period of time.

We got it done by turning to shoggoths: AI agents that did basically all the escape-room development work under the watchful eye of head shoggoth wrangler Flynn. In this talk, Flynn is joined by Or Navon for a candid, in-depth look at the good, the bad, and the terrifying of relying on these tools for high-stakes work under serious time pressure, looking at the escape room and beyond to explore what can work well, what usually won’t, tips about keeping things on track, and—critically—what we find ourselves thinking we need to do differently.