Watch the video version for the demos and screen shares: https://www.youtube.com/live/jCQx4XvrEUk

Holden Karau (Snowflake, formerly Databricks) and Lisa Cao (Databricks DevRel) joined us to dig into what it actually looks like to write Spark code with AI agents in 2026.

We worked through a real example from Holden's High Performance Spark Second Edition — a Goldilocks-style exact percentiles problem across hundreds of columns — and watched Claude Code handle it from a cold-start repo, then again with proper context and a reference solution.

Lisa walked through using a skill file to get Claude to write declarative pipelines the right way instead of hallucinating the syntax, and we talked about why local mode, Arrow UDFs, and th ...