Drupal Dev Days Athens: Autonomous Drupal and the fire in our hands

Live notes from Drupal Developer Days Athens 2026, April 22-25 at OTE Academy.

Getting there

Flying to Athens on April 21st. You don't see the winning cat in the seat in front of me. Apart from that, the flight was really good.

Yesterday I already explored the neighbourhood and enjoyed a Greek salad.

On conference day, April 22nd, I met Mikko from druid.fi at the reception. Dropsolid is happy to sponsor the Dev Days again. Excited for the keynote. Doing this live in production. Always exciting.

The conference

The keynote: Autonomous Drupal

Wednesday morning, 10:15, Room 1 (Amphitheater Pantheon). Forty-five minutes on where Drupal is going.

The title is a reference to Prometheus giving fire to the people, and the ancient Athenian tradition of Lampadedromia, the torch relay. Dries gave fire to the people when he open-sourced Drupal. That can't be undone. Or is AI Pandora's box? The question now is what we do with it.

AI will impact us whether we want it or not

190,000 installs lost in three years. 173 per day. That's the starting point. The Drupal pie is shrinking. The keynote makes the case for why AI is the lever that can turn things around.

The Drupal AI Initiative

The numbers as of April 2026:

• $1.4M in funding
• 34 Makers
• 10 teams, 22.5+ FTEs
• 100+ people involved
• 6,572 installs of the AI module, growing at +259 per week

The module has matured significantly. Version 2.0 is more than ever an abstraction layer that looks a lot like what Symfony AI built later, which is a sign we're doing things right. WordPress, Symfony, and Google are watching.

Some submodules have spun out of the AI core to go their own way.

The new and improved Drupal Flywheel of success

The framework is simple: make it easier to migrate to Drupal, make the editing experience super easy, and provide people with an easy way to tell the story (and an incentive: contribution credits?).

From AI sprinkles to Autonomous Content Framework

The long-term vision: an autonomous content framework. Not just a CMS that helps you publish, but a system that can read legislation, summarise it for your audience in a draft, get that validated by your DPO, and publish it through the editor, with humans in the loop at the right moments.

Bruce, and the live demo

The keynote included a live demo of Bruce, Dropsolid's AI assistant. Blog post published live on stage, written by the assistant from notes sent via Telegram during the conference. The post you're reading now is that demo.

How to get involved

• Become a Maker (join the initiative)
• Contribute code, best practices, marketing, stories, or money

Dropsolid

Thanks to Dropsolid for the space to do things like this: travel to Athens, give a keynote, build live demos on stage.