After two busy days of traveling, we spent the day touring Manhattan before the third and last stop on the 2026 US JUG Tour . This night, Gerrit and I spoke at the New York Java SIG in front of an enthusiastic crowd. The weather, not too hot and not raining, was on our side. Which meant a full house. The pizza was good, the mood was great, and we had a really good time.

As with the previous days, Gerrit started with his presentation Prompt and Pray where he walked us through the steps of creating a Jakarta EE application with AI coding agents. He compared the agents and showed the benefits of having the well-written Jakarta EE specifications as sort of guardrails for the agents to ensure a consistent, lean code base.

I followed up with my presentation about Augmenting AI with the Power of Jakarta EE. I first gave a short history lesson, then an overview of Jakarta EE 11 before walking through a bunch of augmentation techniques to make the LLMs less stupid and more predictable. The session is mostly based on code samples, so it is a fun talk to do.