---
title: "From Agent Traces to Agent Simulations: The next era of agent evaluation"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-06-30"
time: "12:05pm-12:25pm"
track: "Evals"
room: "Track 5"
speakers: ["Rustem Feyzkhanov"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "Evals"
scheduleRoom: "Track 5"
scheduleLabels: ["Evals", "Track 5", "sponsor", "confirmed"]
---
# From Agent Traces to Agent Simulations: The next era of agent evaluation

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 12:05pm-12:25pm
- Track/room: Evals · Track 5
- Speaker(s): Rustem Feyzkhanov
- Session type/status: sponsor · confirmed

- Track: Evals
- Room: Track 5
- Session type: sponsor
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
Agent evaluation is moving beyond reviewing static traces after the fact. This talk explores how executable simulation environments let teams repeatedly test agents across realistic tasks, compare models and harnesses, and uncover failure modes that trace review alone misses. Drawing from Snorkel's experience building simulation datasets at scale for major labs and contributions to projects like Agents' Last Exam and Terminal-Bench, we'll cover concrete engineering patterns for building these environments: defining clear specs and requirements, implementing evaluators for simulation environments and tasks themselves, keeping environments decoupled from any single agent or model, and designing verifiers that evaluate both final outputs and agent traces. Attendees will leave with a practical mental model for creating environments that are lightweight enough to run at scale, but realistic enough to mock production systems such as databases, APIs, and tools in ways that meaningfully challenge agents.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[rustem-feyzkhanov]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# From Agent Traces to Agent Simulations: The next era of agent evaluation ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-06-30 · 12:05pm-12:25pm - Track/room: Evals · Track 5 - Speaker(s): Rustem Feyzkhanov - Session type/status: sponsor · confirmed - Track: Evals - Room: Track 5 - Session type: sponsor - Status: confirmed ## Session Description Agent evaluation is moving beyond reviewing static traces after the fact. This talk explores how executable simulation environments let teams repeatedly test agents across realistic tasks, compare models and harnesses, and uncover failure modes that trace review alone misses. Drawing from Snorkel's experience building simulation datasets at scale for major labs and contributions to projects like Agents' Last Exam and Terminal-Bench, we'll cover concrete engineering patterns for building these environments: defining clear specs and requirements, implementing evaluators for simulation environments and tasks themselves, keeping environments decoupled from any single agent or model, and designing verifiers that evaluate both final outputs and agent traces. Attendees will leave with a practical mental model for creating environments that are lightweight enough to run at scale, but realistic enough to mock production systems such as databases, APIs, and tools in ways that meaningfully challenge agents.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[rustem-feyzkhanov|Rustem Feyzkhanov]] — Senior Engineering Manager - AI Platform at [[snorkel-ai|Snorkel AI]].

### Topics Covered
- Topic links are pending transcript-backed classification.

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.