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World Congress 2026 Europe • Jul 9, 2026 • Session details

Craftsmanship in the Age of Agents

Laura Thorson

With AI driving the cost of code to zero, what is a developer's true value? Discover why technical taste and rigorous human judgment are your greatest competitive edge.

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#1 about 2 min

Redefining software development with agentic workflows

How the transition from code completion to agentic workflows redefines the developer role and daily operations.

#2 about 2 min

Measuring software impact instead of lines of code

How an exponential increase in AI code generation demands a shift in focus to quality and tangible customer impact over raw volume.

#3 about 3 min

Navigating human anxiety in the age of autonomous AI

Embracing the technological shift as a generational opportunity helps mitigate the natural anxiety caused by rapidly evolving AI tools.

#4 about 3 min

The role of craftsmanship and technical taste in engineering

How cultivating technical taste and understanding underlying models are required to transform AI output into trustworthy production software.

#5 about 2 min

Integrating human engineers and autonomous agents in the SDLC

How software development life cycles are evolving to effectively integrate hybrid teams of human engineers and autonomous AI agents.

#6 about 3 min

Three habits of high-trust hybrid developer teams

How successful engineering teams establish ingrained security reviews, measure outcome impact, and cultivate diverse model preferences to optimize complex workflows.

#7 about 3 min

Adapting familiar development primitives for essential agent guardrails

How utilizing standard development constructs like issues and pull requests establishes necessary guardrails and context for agent-generated code.

#8 about 3 min

Scaling organizational trust across hybrid multi-repository workflows

How modern software engineering adapts open-source collaboration patterns to efficiently scale trust across organizational boundaries and multi-repository agentic environments.

#9 about 3 min

Investing in engineering craftsmanship to maintain a competitive edge

Why developers must actively experiment with AI frameworks to discover edge cases, test capabilities, and produce top-tier software artifacts.

#10 about 2 min

Balancing platform availability and security with AI feature releases

How managing massive concurrent scale obligates source control platforms to prioritize infrastructure stability and foundational security above deploying new generative features.

#11 about 3 min

Core human skills required to direct non-deterministic AI agents

Why human curiosity, creativity, and exceptionally clear communication are paramount when directing and evaluating non-deterministic agent workflows.

#12 about 3 min

Helping junior developers build technical taste and foundational judgment

How mentoring junior engineers through deep code interrogation rather than prompt generation ensures the ongoing development of critical technical judgment.

#13 about 3 min

Preventing AI-generated spam in platforms and open-source repositories

How modern collaboration platforms deploy abuse detection capabilities and empower open-source maintainers to actively combat automated content inflation and AI-generated spam.

Matching moments

4:08 min

Transitioning software engineering teams to AI-native development workflows

Florian Deter Florian Deter +4 · WWC Europe 2026

3:33 min

Navigating developer bottlenecks and human accountability

Werner Vogels Werner Vogels +1 · WWC Europe 2026

5:22 min

Differentiating developer skills in the era of artificial intelligence

Chris Heilmann +2 · LIVE

1:48 min

The evolving role of software engineers alongside agents

David Soria Parra David Soria Parra +3 · WWC Europe 2026

2:34 min

Balancing developer autonomy with the adoption of coding agents

Clemens Wasner Clemens Wasner +4 · WWC Europe 2026

3:56 min

The evolution of AI programming and agentic workflows

Fabian Hedin Fabian Hedin · WWC Europe 2026

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