IronClaw
Meetup with
Illia Polosukhin

Why a co-author of "Attention Is All You Need"
is now building the harness layer.

Bong · Welcome · 10min

Tonight's Topics

How I met Illia

I'd been running IronClaw — a small open-source agent harness.
Lean enough to run on 8GB of RAM.

Then at a builder party in SF, I ran into Illia.
He mentioned he'd built IronClaw.
I didn't see that coming.

That conversation brought us to Seoul tonight.

# SF · a random builder party > "I've been using IronClaw for months." > "Oh. I built that." # → Seoul, 2026-04-16

SF · The day we met

Why this. Why now.

Model performance is hitting saturation.

From Transformer to Harness
— A decade of trajectory

When Illia wrote "Attention Is All You Need" in 2017,
what future was he looking at?

Then came NEAR Protocol — and a decade spent
thinking about distributed systems, user sovereignty, and trust.

Now he's back in AI agents. What does he see?

The fact that a Transformer author chose not the model
but the harness layer as his next bet
says something.

IronClaw · Rust harness

Why Harness Layer Matters Now
— Where value is moving

We'll ask Illia how he reads this tradeoff —
and which layer builders should actually be working in.

Open Source as Sovereignty
— Why Rust, why security

The security principles at IronClaw's core.

• Capability-based WASM sandbox
• Zero telemetry — no data leaves. Literally.
• Endpoint allowlisting — agents go only where you say

Four people. One room.

19:20

Illia Polosukhin

NEAR · IronClaw

19:45

Yeachan Heo

oh-my-codex
claw-code

20:10

김동규

Nomadamas
AutoRAG

20:35

Firesidechat

Illia × Jeff Wang
Windsurf (Cognition)

How the night runs

Live KO↔EN text interpretation by tiro.ooo
Feel free to ask in your native language.

The people who made this happen

And you — everyone who showed up with a question.

"The density of questions
shapes the next decade."

Take one thing you hear tonight
and let it show up in your code · writing · decisions tomorrow.

Please welcome — Illia Polosukhin.