There is a quiet tension running through engineering right now. Not panic, not hype. A low-grade signal that the old mechanics of shipping, hiring, and scaling are starting to strain under new weight. Agentic systems are no longer parlor tricks or late-night demos. They are moving into backlogs, roadmaps, and board-level conversations. In the startup ecosystem, this is the phase where tools stop being toys and start becoming liabilities if misunderstood.
That pressure is what pulls people into rooms like this. On Tuesday, February 10, 2026, a focused group of startup CTOs will gather in San Francisco’s Financial District for Startup CTOs (SF): Agentic Experiments. Invite only. Venture backed. Teams running roughly 10–85 engineers. This is not a conference designed for screenshots or recycled frameworks. It is designed for people who already know what breaks when theory meets production and want to compare notes before the cost of getting it wrong compounds.
The room matters. CircleCI is hosting, which is more than symbolic. Continuous integration has always been about trust at speed, about knowing whether the system is telling you the truth. With food, drinks, panels, and breakouts carrying the evening from early discussions into late conversations, the environment is built for candor. This is FiDi after hours, when the city quiets down and the signal-to-noise ratio finally improves.
The people anchoring the conversation carry real operating weight. Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI, has lived enough startup cycles to understand how process either sharpens execution or quietly erodes it. Charity Majors, Co-Founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, reshaped how the industry thinks about observability, which is ultimately about understanding complex systems under stress. Sowmya Subramanian, CTO of Quizlet, brings the perspective of scaling platforms at Google and YouTube and then applying that discipline to education and media. Different backgrounds, shared fluency in consequences.
This doesn’t come together by accident. Peter Bell, Founder and CTO of Gather.dev, has spent over 10 years building spaces where CTOs can think out loud without posturing. Gather is not about audience building. It is about convening practitioners at the exact moment their questions outgrow Slack threads. Support from Howdy.com fits naturally, a company built on the idea that distributed teams only work when structure, trust, and execution mature together, a core tension across the startup ecosystem right now.
Agentic experiments are not about replacing engineers. They are about redefining leverage, responsibility, and taste. When agents write code, leadership shifts toward specification, review, and judgment. The teams that win will be the ones who treat this moment like an operating transition, not a novelty. Nights like this are less about learning something new and more about realizing how fast the ground has already moved beneath the startup ecosystem, and deciding whether you are keeping pace or quietly falling behind.
