Tony Coppola

I’m a millennial who grew up with one foot in the analog world and one foot in the digital world. I remember the days before cellphones and the internet, before social media and LLMs, and learned about computers from internet forums, books, and hours of reading documentation and, later, Stack Overflow posts. I learned what I know about configuring servers, building applications, writing Python and deploying things to the cloud from lots and lots of trial and error, by reading and doing.

Now we have AI harnesses like Claude Code, pi, Cursor and OpenCode, and adapting to a new internet, a new way of conducting business and building applications, has taken center stage for me.

This new internet and way of building things is a little disconcerting, but it’s also freeing at the same time. I’ve never been an exceptional front-end developer, or a great database guy, but I can fill in these gaps now. And with the new techniques that allow planning and building out apps with agents and subagents, I’ve never shipped things faster.

But at the same time, I’m learning how important it is to steer LLMs appropriately. I’ve come to think of myself as a manager, though I never aspired to be one, of swarms of LLMs, and that’s in 2026. It seems a world is coming closer where language will be like magic, where fewer words will be needed to direct and create new things, digital and maybe even physical, and I’m equal parts excited and worried about how that world is going to emerge.

I build and run applications and automation on AWS. Most days that means Terraform, Python and event-driven workflows, with EventBridge rules triggering Lambda functions, plus apps on ECS, Lambda and CloudFront. At Warner Bros. Discovery I help run the platform behind more than 2,000 AWS accounts, and I take new ideas from proof of concept to production, more and more with AI agents.