Free Lesson

Don't build agents, build environments instead

Part of AI Product Engineering

Hosted by Adam Azzam and Hamel Husain

Thu, Jul 30, 2026

9:30 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

Go deeper with a course

Featured in Lenny’s List
AI Evals For Engineers & PMs
Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar
View syllabus

What you'll learn

Give your agents a fast start

See how to hand a coding agent a computer that's ready the second it starts, so nobody waits on it to load.

Keep agents reliable and your secrets safe

Learn how teams like Ramp stop an agent's workspace from breaking during a long job, and keep passwords and keys out of the agent's reach.

Build only what you have to

Get a map of what to build vs buy, along with tradeoffs so you can save time and resources.

Why this topic matters

Coding agents run on a machine you have to set up with the right code and tools. This session shows you how to make that machine start in seconds and stay reliable while the agent works. Adam builds this at Modal and will walk you through what works in production.

You'll learn from

Adam Azzam

Member of Product Staff at Modal

Adam Azzam is a Member of Product Staff at Modal, a high-performance AI infrastructure platform. Before Modal, he was VP of Product at Prefect and a maintainer of Prefect and FastMCP. He holds a PhD in mathematics.

Hamel Husain

ML Engineer with 20+ years of experience

Hamel Husain is a ML Engineer with 20+ years of experience. He has worked with innovative companies such as Airbnb and GitHub, which included early LLM research used by OpenAI, for code understanding. He has also led and contributed to numerous popular open-source machine-learning tools. Hamel is currently an independent consultant helping companies build AI products.

See all products from Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar

Sign up to join this lesson

By continuing, you agree to Maven's Terms and Privacy Policy.