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Move fast and (don't) break things#

AI Engineer World's Fair 2026 digest Program Adjacent pick 29 June – 2 July 2026

Recording

Speakers: Ben Dicken (PlanetScale)

Play the recording: Move fast and (don't) break things

  • Why: AI backends are being asked for 4-nines availability under unprecedented demand; database fleets already solved this class of problem, and the principles transfer to all reliable infrastructure, AI backends included.
  • What: PlanetScale's principles of extreme fault tolerance — isolation, redundancy, static stability, and back-pressure — applied beyond databases to AI application backends, with concrete production failure modes and the patterns that prevent them (from abstract only).
  • How: Architecture principles: isolate failure domains, redundant components, static stability (the system keeps working correctly while a dependency is failing), and back-pressure rather than collapse under overload — illustrated with production incidents.
  • Where applicable: General backend and AI application infrastructure; not GPU- or network-specific, but the static-stability and back-pressure material is solid ops content for cloud platform work.