Lightning Talk - 10x Network Design Engineer#
@Scale: Networking 2026 digest Program Adjacent pick 25 August 2026
Maaz Mohiuddin (Meta)
- Why: Pairs with Loom (Core): where Loom automates physical design as a constraint system, this talk is about agents owning design judgment end-to-end, and it is candid about what still fails — validation above all. The "engineer as author-to-approver" framing is where design automation is heading industry-wide.
- What: Agent-assisted steps in datacenter network design today — sizing a fabric, proposing a topology, analyzing a change — with the trajectory toward a single agent owning design end-to-end, real waypoints from Meta's fabrics, what already works, and where the hard problems remain (validation, above all). Humans still make the call; they no longer draw every line. (from abstract only)
- How: Agents assist discrete steps within the design pipeline with human approval gates; the mechanism detail is not in the abstract.
- Where applicable: Meta's fabrics — org-specific waypoints. The author-to-approver shift and the validation bottleneck are general to any design-automation effort, which is why this earns a slot despite overlapping Loom.