Register for the meet-up
https://hasgeek.com/fifthelephant/agent-harnesses-small-models-hyd-meetup/
Call for Proposals: Agent harnesses & small models in production
Two years ago, it was prompt engineering, then context engineering, then the harness: the tools, permissions and sub-agents you build around the model. Then the loop. Now the graph, and state that has to survive a crash at step 40 of 60.
Each shift arrives with a wave of posts written by people selling a framework, and it takes about a year to find out which parts actually held. So: which of these abstractions are earning their keep, and which are ceremony?
Meanwhile more teams are training and serving their own small models — and not all of them sit inside an agent. Sometimes it’s to cut the bill, often it’s data that can’t leave the building. Is a tuned 8B good enough for your problem? How would you know?
If you’ve designed tools an agent could actually use, or wrestled a long-running job into surviving a crash — if you’ve fine-tuned a small model and measured what you gained and lost — if you’ve made inference cheap or fast enough to ship, or built the evals that told you any of it was working — we want to hear from you.
Who should submit
You probably have a talk in you if you are:
- building agent systems in production
- working on harnesses, evals, or the infrastructure around them
- fine-tuning or deploying small language models
- optimizing inference — cost, latency, or both
- measuring any of this from a product or engineering angle
You don’t need to be an ML researcher. If you’ve shipped and operated something with models in the loop, your experience is exactly what this audience wants.
First time speaking? This is especially for you. Editors review every submission and work with you to shape the talk — some of the best talks here started as a rough idea.
What we’re looking for
- Talks grounded in hands-on experience, not slides lifted from a launch post
- Honest takes: what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d do differently
- Any domain: dev tooling, healthcare, legal, financial services, regional languages, enterprise search — it doesn’t matter
Format: 30-minute talk + 10 minutes Q&A
Timeline
- Submission deadline: 25 August 2026
- Notification of selection: 29 August 2026
How to submit
Submit your abstract at https://hasgeek.com/fifthelephant/hyd-meetup-cfp/sub.
Your abstract should clearly describe:
- the problem or topic being addressed,
- why it is relevant,
- who the session is intended for, and
- the key takeaways attendees can expect
About the editorial team
Chaitanya Sangani - meet-up editor. Chaitanya is an independent AI consultant. He is a member of The Fifth Elephant community and has reviewed talks for the Pune edition, and at The Fifth Elephant 2026 Annual Conference.
Srix Sriramkumar - reviewer. Srix makes engineering teams AI-native. Srix is a member of The Fifth Elephant community and has reviewed submissions for the Enterprise AI in production meet-up, held in Bangalore in June.
Prasun Anand - reviewer - creator of Zasper, a high-performance IDE for Jupyter Notebooks. Spoke at The Fifth Elephant 2025 Annual Conference on building a high-performance JupyterLab alternative.
Madhusudhan Sambojhu - reviewer. Co-founder at Able & Uncommon; software engineer working across web and mobile, and an active reviewer in the Fifthel and Rootconf communities.
Raghotham Sripadraj - guest reviewer - co-founder and CEO at Hypervelocity, leading work on small language models, AI engineering, and intelligent agents. Previously senior data scientist at Freshworks, PayPal, and Ericsson, and a past Fifthel editor.
Contact
- Email: info@hasgeek.com
- WhatsApp / Phone: 7676332020