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Thu, December 10AI-Native Software DevelopmentAI-Native Applications & Product Systems
Every senior engineer developed their judgment through years of writing code, debugging failures, and gradually learning what good engineering looks like. That apprenticeship model depended on junior engineers doing the work. As AI increasingly performs many of those tasks, the lower rungs of that learning ladder are beginning to disappear.
This session explores the consequences of that shift and argues that engineering judgment can be developed deliberately rather than acquired only through experience. Drawing on the science of expertise, including deliberate practice, perceptual exposure, and competence markers, we will examine a progression from using AI, to systematically verifying its output, to designing the environments and specifications that support trustworthy collaboration between engineers and AI systems.
The talk examines why verification is a skill that can be developed, why competence often advances through qualitative shifts rather than gradual accumulation of knowledge, and how to recognize when a team's thinking has outpaced its environment or when its environment has outpaced its understanding.
Rather than asking what AI can do, this session focuses on what engineers must become as AI takes on more of the work that traditionally developed engineering judgment. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for deliberately cultivating the judgment needed to work effectively with increasingly autonomous systems.
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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.
