Cedric Hurst
Principal & Lead Software Engineer at Spantree
Cedric Hurst
Principal & Lead Software Engineer at Spantree
Cedric Hurst is the Founder and CEO of Spantree, a Chicago-based engineering consultancy now operating as a business unit of Trifork, the company behind GOTO conferences. Over 15 years he built Spantree into a team known for hard, data-intensive problems: real-time options trading platforms, computer vision and spatial computing systems, and industrial inspection platforms, and large-scale search and data infrastructure.
He now leads technology strategy for Trifork's North American operations. His team at Spantree has gone all-in on agentic development. Every engineer runs a personal AI agent that manages their coding workflows, communications, and project context. Cedric developed Fluent Workshop, an intensive training program that has walked professional engineering teams through the transition from casual AI tool use to agentic development in production.
He has spent the last two years in Claude Code, MCP servers, multi-agent orchestration, and the day-to-day reality of deploying autonomous AI systems in regulated industries. He builds software through late night Discord messages more often than he'd like to admit.
Upcoming masterclasses featuring Cedric Hurst
From Code Assistants to Autonomous Agents
What you'll walk away with:
- A repeatable approach to directing AI agents through architecture-level changes
- Hands-on experience with coding agents, MCP servers, and subagent orchestration
- An understanding of how orchestration-layer agents work and how to start building your own
- Patterns for voice-first and async AI workflows that untether you from the terminal
- Practical mental models for managing autonomy, trust, and risk in agentic systems
Who this is for:
Senior engineers, tech leads, and architects (5+ years) who use AI tools daily and suspect there's a much bigger gear shift ahead.
Most developers have gotten comfortable with AI autocomplete. A few have started directing coding agents through multi-file changes. Hardly anyone is working at the level that comes next, where the line between thinking about software and building it starts to blur.
This full-day masterclass covers the full abstraction ladder of AI-assisted development:
Level 1: IDE-Integrated Assistants. GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cody, and similar tools have gotten very good. Code generation, inline chat, early agentic features. We'll look at what they do well and where they hit a natural ceiling: the editor window. They don't know about your Slack threads, your deploy pipeline, or your team's architectural decisions from last quarter.
Level 2: Coding Agents. Tools like Claude Code that understand your whole codebase, coordinate changes across dozens of files, and execute plans on their own. You'll get hands-on with agentic coding workflows, the Core Four (Context, Model, Prompt, Tools), MCP server integration, and multi-agent orchestration.
Level 3: Orchestration Agents. The layer above coding agents. Systems that manage your tools, communications, memory, and workflows across Slack, GitHub, calendars, and APIs. At Spantree, our engineers dispatch coding sessions from autonomous agents that hold long-term context, triage notifications, draft pull requests, scaffold documentation sites, and ship deployable artifacts. Sometimes the whole thing starts with a voice memo recorded at the gym.
That voice memo thing isn't a party trick. When your agent understands your codebase, your calendar, your team's Slack channels, and your architectural preferences, the keyboard becomes optional. You think out loud. Software happens.
We'll also be honest about the tradeoffs: trust boundaries, prompt injection risks, knowing when to let the agent run and when to pull back. This workshop comes from daily production use across an entire engineering consultancy, not a research lab.
Reserve your spot now
Content featuring Cedric Hurst
Robot DJs: Better Spotify Playlists through Music Theory and Discrete Optimization
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