Fundamentals of Software Engineering in the Age of AI

AI doesn’t replace what you know. It multiplies it. Hand a coding agent to someone who understands design, testing, and how systems fail, and they move faster than ever. Hand it to someone who doesn’t, and they produce more code they can’t explain, faster than ever. Same tool. Very different results.

That’s what the “software engineering is dead” headlines miss. We’ve heard it before with code generators, low-code, and no-code. Each time, the job changed, the fundamentals stayed, and the people who understood the craft came out ahead.

In this keynote, Dan Vega and Nate Schutta look at what is really changing in our work and what is just noise. We’ll talk about the skills that matter more now, not less: reading code critically, naming and design, testing, and the judgment to know when an answer is wrong. You’ll leave knowing where to invest your time, and why the craft is worth more than ever.