Code Freeze 2025 speaker: Adam Terlson

Timeless Tech, Modern Magic: Building Agentic AI Systems with Finite State Machines

Abstract

From our AI overlord's perspective, the world is state machines all the way down. This talk explores how the timeless Finite State Machine and Actor Model can power complex Agentic AI workflows to tackle today’s toughest problems (like taking all our jobs). State Machines are a timeless design tool, offering a structured way to model complex systems with clarity, predictability, and control—whether you're building on the bleeding edge of AI or not. The Actor Model extends this foundation to distributed systems, enabling independent, concurrent entities to communicate seamlessly. By combining these principles, engineers can build operable systems capable of planning, perceiving, and deciding while mitigating some risks of doing so. This talk will introduce common Agentic patterns like tool use, reflection, planning, supervision, human-in-the-loop, and more through the lens of beautiful state charts.

Biography

Adam is an engineer and leader with a mission to improve people's lives with technology. Passionate about building, helping others, challenging the status quo, and leading from the heart, Adam delivers on challenging technological and organizational problems across industries, teams, platforms, and technologies.

While at Best Buy, Adam delivered Mobile Self Checkout from concept to 900 retail store locations—built using Finite State Machines for microservice orchestration and mobile app logic, of course—and lead a project to enable Cloud Native and DevOps practices on AWS at Fortune 100 scale. Living abroad in Munich, Germany for 5 years, Adam re-imaged the InterNations app with React Native, taking it from 2.3 to 4.6 stars. Adam now works as a consultant.

Today he focuses on continuously learning, building with and without AI, and spending time outside in the woods with his 3 kids.

LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamterlson/