swyx told AI Engineer’s World’s Fair crowd, billed as Why we gather at AI Engineer World’s Fair 2026, that the highest loop is the gathering that designs the next loops as attendance hit 7,000 versus 2,000 in 2024.
He framed the work as Loopcraft, a stack of while loops covering cron jobs, automations and software factories where teams move up a loop to scale inference and down a loop to restore reliability.
He traced a human loop from heartbeat to talk to tools to work to tiny teams to civilization-scale collective intelligence.
The Fair itself is pitched as the summit of summits, with satellite summits in New York, Paris, Singapore, Melbourne and Miami and a new partnerships team to seed more.
He noted the Fair aimed for 6,000 and reached 7,000, up from about 2,000 at the first World Fair in 2024, but said what he called the Jenny coefficient on ticket purchases rose after he asked buyers to come earlier.
