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Bio, Work & Ideas

Vincent Koc

Conference affiliation: Comet ML / OpenClaw · 2026

Vincent Koc is Chief Architect of the OpenClaw Foundation and a core maintainer of OpenClaw, the open-source personal AI agent. He designs the architecture, evaluation, observability, and security systems that make autonomous agents easier to supervise as they acquire greater independence.

Koc previously held data-leadership positions in Australia: digital analytics manager and analytics chapter lead at Qantas in 2020, followed by head of data at hipages Group by 2023. He subsequently worked at Comet on AI research, evaluation, and developer relations, investigating how non-Latin languages expose weaknesses in conventional model benchmarks and introducing Opik Agent Optimizer in 2025.

His research on telemetry-aware development connected coding environments with traces and evaluation feedback through the Model Context Protocol. He also developed OpenClaw observability with an Opik integration that records tool execution, token usage, costs, and errors. After contributing to OpenClaw alongside his Comet work, he joined the OpenClaw Foundation as chief architect.

  • Dark-factory agent orchestration. Koc organizes coding agents into parallel lanes for bug fixes, features, continuous integration, and urgent issues, with engineers supervising priorities and reasoning quality. His OpenClaw maintenance workflow treats human judgment as the limiting resource, not raw commit volume.
  • Modular agent architecture. While collaborating on NVIDIA NemoClaw, Koc helped refactor OpenClaw around plugins and separable provider integrations, reducing pressure to absorb every community feature into the core codebase.
  • Malleable evaluations. He argues that agents with changing tools, users, and objectives cannot be adequately measured by fixed benchmarks. His adaptive approach to agent evaluation combines component testing, production traces, refreshed evaluation suites, and feedback aligned with user intent.
  • Telemetry-aware agent optimization. Koc connects operational evidence directly to corrective action: harnesses can use failures, costs, and evaluation results to adjust behavior. His tokenjuice project extends that concern to token efficiency in terminal-heavy coding workflows.
  • Layered security for agent skills. As lead author of ClawHub Security Signals, Koc examined 67,453 public OpenClaw skill versions using complementary security checks. The resulting silver-standard security dataset reflects automated judgments, not human-verified maliciousness.

Read the topics behind these talks

2 conference talks

Key ideas

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When agents generate changes faster than maintainers can read them, the engineering work shifts toward task allocation, regression signals, reusable skills, and human judgment.

  • Waking up to another advancement
    0:16 ↗
  • The cost of working at the frontier
    1:05 ↗
  • From writing code to managing production
    2:18 ↗
  • What the throughput figures mean
    3:39 ↗
  • Beyond maximizing commits and tokens
    5:28 ↗
  • Concurrent agents on a moving codebase
    6:12 ↗
  • The Great Refactor
    7:33 ↗
  • Assigning attention across swim lanes
    9:22 ↗
  • When workspace isolation becomes overhead
    11:04 ↗
  • Recognizing a session that needs intervention
    12:06 ↗
  • Maintaining the agent development environment
    13:21 ↗
  • Selecting work and checking integrated behavior
    14:28 ↗
  • Managing the factory without wasting tokens
    15:37 ↗

Key ideas

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As agents adapt their tools, behavior and user experience, evaluation needs to evolve with them—from fixed examples to trace-derived tests and telemetry-guided feedback.

  • When intended use stops describing actual use
    0:51 ↗
  • The missing chaos-engineering layer
    1:54 ↗
  • When the harness changes, what does a passing test mean?
    4:21 ↗
  • From wordsmithing prompts to testing components
    5:36 ↗
  • More generation, more adaptation
    7:25 ↗
  • Define outcomes, then let traces reshape the tests
    10:00 ↗
  • Put operational feedback inside the loop
    11:19 ↗
  • Make the desired end state the evaluation target
    12:12 ↗
  • Maintain the changing edge of behavior
    13:30 ↗

References