Software engineering

Dec 23, 2025

Developer Experience in the Age of AI Coding Agents – Max Kanat Alexander, Capitol One

Max Kanat-Alexander explores the rapid changes in software engineering driven by AI and identifies 'no-regrets investments' that will benefit development teams regardless of the future. He argues that by focusing on foundational developer experience principles—such as standardizing tools, improving validation, structuring code for testability, and refining the code review process—organizations can create a virtuous cycle of productivity for both human developers and their AI agent counterparts.

Dec 22, 2025

Making Codebases Agent Ready – Eno Reyes, Factory AI

The effectiveness of AI coding agents is not limited by model quality, but by "Agent Readiness"—the state of your development environment. This talk explains why agents fail on codebases with flaky tests, low validation, and tribal knowledge. It introduces a framework for improving your environment's readiness through rigorous verification, automated validation, and a shift to specification-driven development, arguing this is the key to unlocking 5-7x productivity gains and enabling true software engineering autonomy.

Dec 20, 2025

The Infinite Software Crisis – Jake Nations, Netflix

In an era of the "Infinite Software Crisis" where AI-generated code outpaces human understanding, this talk argues for choosing "simple" design over "easy" generation. The speaker presents a three-phase methodology—Research, Planning, and Implementation—that forces developers to think critically before generating code. This approach leverages AI for mechanical tasks while ensuring that human judgment, context, and a deep understanding of the system remain the core of the software development process, turning human insight into the ultimate competitive advantage.

Dec 16, 2025

Fundamentals of Data Engineering • Matt Housley & Joe Reis

Joe Reis and Matt Housley, authors of "Fundamentals of Data Engineering," discuss how AI has transformed data engineering practices since their book's release. They emphasize the enduring importance of foundational knowledge, the challenges AI poses for junior engineers, and the critical balance between leveraging AI assistance and maintaining core expertise in an increasingly complex field.

Dec 14, 2025

Why humans are AI's biggest bottleneck (and what's coming in 2026) | Alexander Embiricos (OpenAI)

Alexander Embiricos, product lead for OpenAI's Codex, discusses the vision of AI as a proactive software engineering teammate, not just a tool. He covers the product decisions that led to Codex's 20x growth, how it enabled shipping the Sora Android app in 18 days, and why the real bottleneck to AGI-level productivity is shifting from model capability to human review speed and interaction.

Nov 24, 2025

Vision: Zero Bugs — Johann Schleier-Smith, Temporal

This talk explores the history of high-assurance software, from the near-perfect code of the NASA Space Shuttle to the Airbus A320. It argues that while these rigorous engineering and formal verification practices were once too expensive for mainstream use, the economic shift brought by AI and agentic coding can make aerospace-level reliability a practical reality for a wide range of applications, solving the key quality limitations of current AI-generated code.