The full Web Directions Engineering AI program
Software Engineering is being transformed
September 12, 2025 | Sydney & Online webdirections.org/eng-ai
Software engineering is undergoing its most significant transformation in decades. AI isn't just another tool in your IDE—it's fundamentally reshaping how we architect systems, manage teams, and deliver value. Web Directions Engineering AI brings together the engineers and leaders who are already living in this new reality, sharing battle-tested approaches for integrating AI into production environments.
This isn't about the hype. It's about the practical, exciting, sometimes uncomfortable realities of what happens when AI joins your engineering team. From experienced professionals sharing what they’ve learned.
Program Overview
From Skepticism to Strategic Adoption
The journey to AI integration often starts with healthy skepticism. Dave Berner, Co-founder & VP Engineering at Kinde, kicks off the conference with "Co-pilot, not auto-pilot"—a candid look at his own resistance to the AI wave and the real-world use cases that changed his mind. From engineering to marketing to product, Dave shares where AI has genuinely accelerated development at a fast-moving startup, and crucially, where they've deliberately chosen not to use it. His talk addresses the elephant in the room: how do we avoid the AI feedback loop while maintaining our humanity in the process?
Geoffrey Huntley from Sourcegraph takes this further with "The future belongs to people who can just do things". Drawing parallels to the leap from assembly to high-level languages, Geoff argues we're entering a new abstraction layer in software development. For engineering leaders, this means reassessing carefully crafted roadmaps and preparing teams for what he calls the "oh-f*ck" moment—when the pace of change becomes undeniable.
Architecture and Engineering Systems for the AI Era
As AI capabilities mature, the engineering challenges shift from "should we?" to "how do we?" Jakub Riedl, Principal AI Engineer at Culture Amp, tackles this head-on with "Is your tech stack AI ready?" This session dives deep into the engineering practice evolution required for AI integration: from adapting Model Context Protocols (MCPs) for service integration to building observability patterns for non-deterministic systems. Jakub shares real-world experiences from Culture Amp and Appear on transforming traditional software engineering practices for AI-augmented architectures.
Ben Taylor, Product Engineering Team Lead at Stile Education, demonstrates the surprisingly approachable process of "Building MCP Servers That Actually Work". Through a live implementation of a WebAssembly-based code execution environment, Ben shows how MCP servers create standardized bridges between AI assistants and external tools. Watch Claude solve LeetCode problems in real-time while learning the architectural patterns that make it possible.
The New Engineering Workflow
The most immediate impact of AI on engineering teams is in day-to-day workflows. Tanya Dixit, Generative AI Solutions Architect at Google, presents "The Agentic Engineer's Playbook: From Prompting to Patterns". Moving beyond "prompt-and-pray" mode, Tanya reveals three battle-tested patterns for productive AI collaboration, including the game-changing "scratchpad" technique and strategic frameworks for choosing between different AI tools based on your actual objectives.
Jason O'Neil from Culture Amp's Developer Experience team offers a refreshingly practical take with "Give it the boring jobs". Jason demonstrates how Large Language Models excel at the repetitive, tedious tasks that keep codebases healthy—from managing breaking changes in dependencies to refactoring architectural patterns across hundreds of files. With the right context engineering, AI becomes remarkably effective at the maintenance work that often gets deprioritized.
Scaling AI Development Without Breaking Your Team
As organizations move beyond experimentation, new challenges emerge. Andrew Fisher, Fractional CTO at Rocket Melbourne/Loypal, addresses a critical concern in "Scaling Coding Agents (without breaking your dev team)". The thought of multiple coding agents working across a mature codebase might fill engineering managers with dread, but Andrew argues the real issue isn't the agents—it's whether your systems can handle a sudden influx of new developers, human or otherwise. Learn how to implement engineering systems that benefit both coding agents and human developers.
Apurva Misra, AI Consultant at Sentick, maps out "How Generative Tools Are Re-Architecting the Software Engineer's Role". This session dissects the new workflow treating prompts, context windows, and synthetic tests as first-class artifacts under version control. Apurva highlights emerging roles from model-ops to domain-centric "toolsmiths" and provides a practical toolkit for evolving from human-only coding to AI-augmented engineering.
The Ambient AI Revolution
Perhaps the most profound shift is towards ambient AI—agents that don't just respond but actively observe and collaborate. Mic Neale, Principal Engineer at Block and creator of the Goose AI agent, explores this frontier in "With ambient AI, you don't prompt AI agents, AI Agents prompt you". Drawing from his experience building developer infrastructure at CloudBees and now leading Goose development at Block, Mic examines three critical shifts: the radical trust required when agents access your entire digital life, the new economics of intelligence (where AI costs can represent a third of a creative professional's salary), and why the most powerful agents embrace complexity rather than hide from it.
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Blair Woods, CTO of SupaHuman AI, rounds out this theme with "Code, Culture, Context: What Changes When AI Joins the Team". With over two decades spanning startups to enterprises, Blair explores how engineering culture evolves when AI becomes a team member. This isn't just about code generation—it's about transforming collaboration patterns and understanding why context matters more than ever.
Who Should Attend
This conference is designed for:
Format & Networking
Join us in Sydney for a full day of learning and connection, or participate online from anywhere. The hybrid format ensures maximum accessibility while maintaining the energy of in-person collaboration.
Beyond the talks, you'll have opportunities to:
Key Takeaways
Attendees will leave with:
Register Now
The future of software engineering isn't coming—it's already here. Join us at Web Directions Engineering AI to learn from the practitioners who are defining what it means to be an engineer in the age of AI.
September 12, 2025 Sydney & Online Register at webdirections.org/eng-ai
Web Directions Engineering AI: Where software engineering meets its future.
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