Your AI Agent Starts Every Session Like a New Hire - Killian Carlsen-Phelan, Sonar

Killian Carlsen-Phelan

Talks worth your time · Agentic engineering · 2026-11-02 · 18 min · 9 pages

Every new coding agent session starts like a new hire: it doesn't know your conventions, architecture rules or approved libraries, so it burns time and tokens searching your repo and repeats the issues already in it. Killian Carlsen-Phelan of Sonar introduces Sonar Vortex, a plugin that hands your agent a map of the codebase and your guidelines before it writes, then deterministically checks every edit. In a live session, Vortex catches a temp-file permission bug the agent's own tests missed, and rejects its first fix. Sonar reports 36% fewer tokens and 44% fewer production outages. Chapters: 0:00 Intro 0:26 Every agent session starts from scratch 1:59 What Sonar Vortex does 2:25 The bug a test wouldn't catch 3:35 96% don't trust AI code, 48% verify it 4:26 How Vortex guides the agent 7:00 36% fewer tokens 8:08 Bringing SonarQube into the agent loop 9:01 Demo: a real task 13:03 Not AI checking AI 14:17 The fix that wasn't a fix 16:20 What you get Killian Carlsen-Phelan https://www.sonarsource.com Join us in SF for the second annual AIE CODE summit: https://aie.codes our last flagship summit of 2026. Applications live now!

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