I attended my first WebSummit this week. I was planning to write a longer post on my blog, but in the meantime, I realized I don’t feel like it. So here are few, short, summarized and totally random takeaways:
1 – Too much AI. I mean, I was prepared for a lot of AI stuff. But nothing prepared me for SO MUCH AI. I feel I need a detox. Seriously, people, you don’t need to fit AI everywhere. Interestingly, some of the most interesting startups and projects I saw and ended up having longer talks about had absolutely zero to do with AI.
1.1 – What did surprise me was to see that big companies are taking AI really seriously and are integrating it in many places, from HR to customer support, from development to marketing.
2 – What’s this weird trend to put “OS” in your product name? An OS is an Operating System. Your webapp is not an OS. Your platform to control agents is not an OS. Such a weird trend…
3 – The talks were a bit of a letdown for me. I was hoping for more technical stuff and the opportunity to learn more. But the 20-30min ones I attended were mostly superficial discussions on things everyone already knows. A few exceptions, of course. I guess the Masterclasses would have been better for that, but I couldn’t make it to those.
3.1 – With the above in mind, I wouldn’t pay that ticket price to go. Too expensive for the value you take out, at least as a regular attendee.
4 – I think I visited every single Alpha start-up. And honestly, don’t understand how some of these startups expect to survive. Some ideas are so easily copied and reproduced that sometimes I found myself thinking “yeah this is nice, but I could build it in a weekend, why would I/someone pay for this?”
4.1 – But again, I was startled to see that some of these weak ideas were already in the Beta stage! Which means they already had investors or revenue. So maybe I’m the one wrong here? I’m absolutely lost at how they managed to pull through. Perhaps there really is a lot of money to throw around at all kinds of stuff, or the planet is big enough for all sorts of crazy ideas!
5 – VIBE CODING. Lots of companies are betting on vibe coding and agentic systems. Besides two of the big ones, there were at least 2 or 3 new and small startups that also promised “quick apps” with no code.
During my 2nd night I decided to put this to the test. I had an idea for a fairly simple app that I wanted to try. So I opened a tab for each of these companies (not mentioning names because that’s not the point), including the 2 famous ones.
30 min later, guess how many managed to make my app work? Zero. The most famous one nearly got there, but it didn’t work in the end.
Now guess how I made it work. Claude Code 😎 Unbeatable! It may not have the easy and pretty UI, but it gets the job done.
I found the exaggerated promises that these companies advertise really shocking. Yes, you are able to build a “to-do” list app when you demo it. That’s nice. But that’s a long way from “idea to production in 20min”
But one thing was nice to hear. In one of the interviews with Repl.it CEO, when the interviewer asked about impact and how companies were using it, he kinda of dodged the question in a graceful way. He mentioned how managers and C-level people sometimes struggled to communicate ideas. Now they could go into a meeting and take a “working” prototype to show exactly what they want. (my quotes)
Yes, exactly! It’s great to do prototypes, MVPs, PoCs. Let’s not promise production-ready apps then, yes?
6 – Context is the key! Managed to attend two great sessions on the importance of Context in AI. At least for the foreseeable future, I predict the relevance of managing and optimizing context will continue to grow. I did take the opportunity to pat myself on the back a bit, because all the things I have been doing so far seem to be going in the right direction.
7 – To conclude with some gratitude, it was very nice to have free water and coffee machines spread out across all the pavilions!
Not sure if I’ll be back next year, but I sure am curious to see how all the AI craziness will evolve in 12-month time and what kind of stuff we will have next year!