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Wed, December 9AI-Native Applications & Product SystemsTrust, Security & Governance
Software engineering has experienced major transitions before. Assembly programming gave way to compilers. Physical infrastructure gave way to the cloud. Each transition followed a similar pattern. The work that many believed defined engineering became the medium through which engineering was practiced. The rigor did not disappear. It relocated toward higher levels of abstraction and intent.
This transition is different. For the first time, software participates in reasoning. Systems can plan, act, and write software, raising a new question: when the act of doing is increasingly delegated, what becomes the role of the engineer?
This keynote argues that the enduring product of programming has never been code itself, but the understanding of why a system works and what it is intended to achieve. That understanding continues to reside with people, even as AI changes how software is created.
Rather than treating this transition as something happening to the profession, the session explores how engineers can deliberately shape it. AI amplifies the discipline, judgment, and intent that already exist within engineering teams. As a result, the future of software engineering depends not only on increasingly capable systems, but also on how engineers redefine their responsibilities as those systems become more autonomous.
The keynote concludes by framing the two questions that underpin the conference: how increasingly autonomous systems earn trust, and how engineers develop the judgment required to extend that trust responsibly.
What You Will Learn:
Who Should Attend:
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Russ Miles is a Principal Engineer in Agentic Engineering at TechTalk, where he helps teams thrive in one of software's harshest and most consequential frontiers: building systems alongside AI. He is the author of The Sovereign Engineer series and the creator of Habitat Thinking, a framework for treating engineering environments as habitats to be cultivated rather than factories to be optimised. Through talks, workshops, consultancy, books, and open source, Russ helps people navigate the complicated and the complex to do
their best work in the age of agentic software.
Russ writes two Substack publications — A Software Enchiridion on the craft and philosophy of engineering, and Engineering Agents on building software alongside AI.
