Why it matters
Mostly a mobile-UI meetup, but a NYT engineer walking through a solver agent for word puzzles is a concrete, unusual production use case for agentic reasoning outside the typical coding-agent context.
The tokenmaxxing angle
A puzzle-solving agent is a narrow, well-bounded task — a good real-world data point for whether a small, cheap model with tight deterministic context beats a general frontier model on cost per solve for this kind of problem.
From the organizers
Shafik Quoraishee is credited as a game developer at the New York Times working on Crossplay, Wordle, Connections, and the Crosswords; the second talk is billed as a FlutterCon follow-up from DraftKings engineer Yuhao Feng.