Robert Brennan

I miss spending hours tuning my IDE, my dotfiles, my neovim setup, my PS1 prompt, my tmux config. In 2023, my workstation was hyper-customized to my preferences and needs.Now that agents write all my code, that work has gone in the bin.

One of the hardest truths about contemporary software is that it rots: dependencies go out of support, vulnerabilities are announced, and APIs break. Keeping up is a huge burden for software teams, and mostly involves rote work and toil, rather than creativity or deep thought.

Today's agents are best at small, atomic coding tasks. Much larger tasks--like major refactors and breaking dependency updates--are highly automatable but hard to one-shot. In this session, we'll discuss patterns for orchestrating large-scale code changes with swarms of agents and a human in the loop.

The adoption of AI into software development has been bumpy. While autocomplete tools like Copilot have gone mainstream, autonomous agents like Devin and OpenHands have generated both enthusiasm and skepticism. Some engineers claim they generate a 10x productivity boost; others that they just create noise and tech debt.