​What context are you drawing on when you make life's biggest decisions?

​​​About the event

​You’ve watched a coding agent read your files and fix its own mistakes.

​You’ve also watched it spin for thirty seconds before saying anything at all.

​So what’s actually happening underneath?

​Join Pillars Network for an evening that opens up the AI machines you use every day, and asks what it can teach us about the decisions we make as Muslims.

​Danial Hasan will kick off the night by taking you from the agent on your screen to the infrastructure behind it. He’ll connect applied AI (how agents and their harnesses are built) with inference engineering (how the tokens powering them actually get delivered).

​Then Hassam Munir, Islamic historian and educator, turns inference back on us. He will take us through how past generations navigated new technologies and innovations, what they drew on when the answer wasn’t obvious and what it means for a generation now facing AI.

​Because a model is only as good as what it was trained on.

​So are we.

​Your ticket includes admission to the event and one drink from Shaghf Café.

​​​Who is this event best-suited for?

​This session is one of our more technical events, designed for those who want to go deeper into how AI systems work beneath the surface. Priority will be given to applicants with a computer science or engineering background and hands-on experience building with AI.

​To get the most out of it, you should already use coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor or Codex regularly, understand how they operate (calling tools, executing code, managing and compacting context and coordinating with other agents) and have a working sense of what they’re capable of and where they break down.

​The session builds directly on that foundation, moving from how agents and their harnesses are built into how inference providers deliver the tokens behind them. Without that background, much of the technical content will be difficult to follow.

​Pillars hosts events for people at different stages and backgrounds, and this is just one of them. If this one isn’t the right fit yet, we’d love to see you at an upcoming event, including future beginner-friendly AI sessions.

​​About the speakers

​Danial Hasan is an applied AI engineer, 3x founder and CTO and current Member of Technical Staff at Appear. His work focuses on building practical AI systems, agents and developer tools, with an emphasis on context engineering and agentic workflows. He has led technical workshops for Codex Community Toronto, Rootly and other developer communities. Danial brings a hands-on engineering perspective to this conversation, helping us understand what happens behind the AI agents we use every day, from the context they work with to the infrastructure powering their responses.

​Hassam Munir is an Executive Producer at Yaqeen Institute, Co-Founder of Tarikh AI, Islamic history researcher, public educator and content creator with over 24K followers. His work explores the intellectual, scientific and cultural contributions of Muslim civilizations and their relevance today. Through Tarikh AI, which uses AI to simulate conversations with historical Muslim figures grounded in authentic sources, Hassam brings a particularly relevant perspective to this discussion: how the knowledge and context we draw upon shape the answers we generate, whether through artificial intelligence or our own decision-making.

​​​About Pillars Network ​

​Pillars Network is a Canadian Muslim movement building spaces and programs for Islamic education, professional growth and cross-sector collaboration. We exist to bring Canadian Muslims into the same rooms to learn, connect, upskill and collaborate around what we are responsible for building together. ​Questions? Email the Pillars Network team or reach out to the Co-Founders directly: Afifa, Muhib or Nabeeha.

​​​About Shaghf Café Waterloo

​Thank you to Shaghf Café Waterloo, our venue partner.

​Shaghf Café Waterloo is a specialty coffee and dessert chain founded in the UAE in 2018 that has expanded with locations in North America. The café offers traditional Arabic and specialty coffee drinks like Spanish lattes and pistachio frappés, alongside Gulf-inspired desserts, viral treats and pastries. Designed with a warm and cozy atmosphere, it serves as a popular spot for socializing, studying or relaxing over handcrafted brews.