Derek Bingham is a senior developer advocate at Amazon Web Services who builds practical demonstrations of how AI agents and coding assistants behave inside real software systems. Based in Perth, he supports developer communities across Australia and New Zealand, with particular interests in cloud architecture, application development, and maintaining human control over AI-generated work.
After approximately 15 years as a software developer and engineer, Bingham joined AWS as a solutions architect. Three years later, he moved into developer advocacy in 2020, a transition he described in an autobiographical account of the role. His earlier work included React Native, Flutter, AWS Amplify, AppSync, and infrastructure as code, documented through open-source application examples and a Flutter architecture tutorial.
- Rocky, an autonomous Minecraft agent. Bingham helped create a conversational bot that translates player requests into navigation, digging, animal identification, and simple construction. His AI Engineer World’s Fair demonstration showed Rocky converting a request for a double-decker couch into executable block coordinates.
- Stateful execution with managed agent orchestration. Rocky’s initial LangChain, AWS Lambda, SageMaker, and Cohere architecture grew unwieldy as its tools multiplied. Bingham and collaborators rebuilt its orchestration around Agents for Amazon Bedrock and Claude 3 Haiku while keeping Minecraft and Mineflayer on Amazon ECS: the bot requires persistent state that Lambda cannot provide. Explicit tool parameters, return-of-control actions, and constrained JSON connect model reasoning to reliable execution.
- Engineering discipline for AI-assisted coding. Bingham applies established practices such as test-driven development, pair programming, and code-quality review to software development with AI assistants, resisting productivity assessments based solely on speed.
