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Aug 7, 2026

The Human Side of Software Engineering in the Age of AI - Olena Babenko

Olena Babenko warns that generative AI is quietly destroying developers' architectural judgment through accidental cognitive delegation. Discover how to stop blindly offloading problem-solving and reclaim your engineering expertise.

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#1 about 2 min

Providing managed database and streaming services for developers

Managed services for streaming and databases remove operational burdens from daily development work.

#2 about 2 min

Losing technical expertise through excessive AI delegation

Delegating cognitive tasks and problem-solving to artificial intelligence can inadvertently diminish personal technical expertise.

#3 about 2 min

Debugging distributed systems with artificial intelligence tools

Large language models struggle with uncertainty and often provide premature conclusive decisions instead of exploratory debugging options.

#4 about 5 min

Mitigating hallucination and overconfidence in artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence tools often fail in customer support by forcing definitive answers instead of collaborating with human experts to explore options.

#5 about 5 min

Balancing artificial intelligence automation with human empathy

While startups might risk full automation to save costs, open source projects prioritize human quality and empathy over large language model efficiency.

#6 about 5 min

Combatting artificial intelligence bot traffic in open source

Assessing a contributor's understanding of business logic and trade-offs prevents fully automated pull requests from overwhelming open source maintainers.

#7 about 4 min

Fostering team collaboration beyond individual code generation

Artificial intelligence tools lack mechanisms to keep multiple humans in the loop for complex maintenance and product support tasks.

#8 about 7 min

Building engineering communities and finding technical inspiration

Engaging with colleagues and developer communities provides valuable insights into complex engineering roles like site reliability and operations.

Matching moments

3:33 min

Navigating developer bottlenecks and human accountability

Werner Vogels Werner Vogels +1 · WWC Europe 2026

3:32 min

Preserving the joy and curiosity of human coding

Chris Heilmann +4 · LIVE

6:29 min

Balancing AI enthusiasm with cynical engineering tool practices

3:45 min

Balancing AI tool mandates with developer trust and productivity

Chris Heilmann +2 · LIVE

5:16 min

Motivations for adopting AI to enhance developer productivity

2:34 min

Balancing developer autonomy with the adoption of coding agents

Clemens Wasner Clemens Wasner +4 · WWC Europe 2026

Upcoming sessions on this topic

Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

The Broken Rung: How AI is Rebuilding Software Development from the Ground Up

Tomislav Tipurić

Chief Technology Officer, Nephos

Tomislav Tipurić
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

When Humans Stop Writing Code: Rethinking Languages, Compilers, and Responsibility

Simon Auer

Organizer of flutter vienna meetup and CEO of marqably

Simon Auer
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

The spectrum of agentic coding: From vibe coding to high-quality software engineering

YK Sugi

Developer Experience Manager at Eventual

YK Sugi
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Beyond the Code: Human-AI Synergies in Product Development

Ajita Kanchivakam Ananth

Staff Technical Program Manager at Google

Ajita Kanchivakam Ananth
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

AI That Argues With Itself: Building Self-Debating Systems That Catch Their Own Bugs

Shreya Singhal

AI Applied Scientist at Claritev

Shreya Singhal
Open session

World Congress 2026 North America

Engineering the Pivot: How Creative Strategy Solves the Hard Problems of AI Accuracy and Scale

Shruti Tiwari

AI/ML product manager, Dell

Shruti Tiwari

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