---
title: "Move fast and (don’t) break things"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-07-01"
time: "12:05pm-12:25pm"
track: "Expo Stage 3 SW"
room: "Expo Stage 3 SW"
speakers: ["Ben Dicken"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: ""
scheduleRoom: "Expo Stage 3 SW"
scheduleLabels: ["Expo Stage 3 SW", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# Move fast and (don’t) break things

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 12:05pm-12:25pm
- Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 3 SW
- Speaker(s): Ben Dicken
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: track TBD
- Room: Expo Stage 3 SW
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
Engineers want to move fast with AI, but the infrastructure underneath is buckling. Status pages across the industry make this clear. Here, you'll learn how to build systems that maintain 4-nines of availability while meeting unprecedented customer demand using the principles of extreme fault tolerance. PlanetScale has written about how we apply these principles to operating databases across our fleet (https://planetscale.com/blog/the-principles-of-extreme-fault-tolerance). This matters not just for databases, but all aspects of reliable infrastructure. Isolation, redundancy, static stability, and back-pressure are the building-blocks to achieving this. Sticking to such principles when architecting the backend of AI applications ensures our systems are resilient to failure while still being flexible enough to scale. We'll look at concrete failure modes from production systems and the patterns that prevent them.

## 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
- [[ben-dicken]]

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

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# Move fast and (don’t) break things ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-07-01 · 12:05pm-12:25pm - Track/room: track TBD · Expo Stage 3 SW - Speaker(s): Ben Dicken - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: track TBD - Room: Expo Stage 3 SW - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description Engineers want to move fast with AI, but the infrastructure underneath is buckling. Status pages across the industry make this clear. Here, you'll learn how to build systems that maintain 4-nines of availability while meeting unprecedented customer demand using the principles of extreme fault tolerance. PlanetScale has written about how we apply these principles to operating databases across our fleet (https://planetscale.com/blog/the-principles-of-extreme-fault-tolerance).

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[ben-dicken|Ben Dicken]] — role not listed at company not listed.

### 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.