Assembling Your Software Factory

This Talk introduces the Epic Stack, a project starter and reference for modern web development. It emphasizes that the choice of tools is not as important as we think and that any tool can be fine. The Epic Stack aims to provide a limited set of services and common use cases, with a focus on adaptability and ease of swapping out tools. It incorporates technologies like Remix, React, Fly to I.O, Grafana, and Sentry. The Epic Web Dev offers free materials and workshops to gain a solid understanding of the Epic Stack.

The rise of AI engineers is driven by the demand for AI and the emergence of ML research and engineering organizations. Start-ups are leveraging AI through APIs, resulting in a time-to-market advantage. The future of AI engineering holds promising results, with a focus on AI UX and the role of AI agents. Equity in AI and the central problems of AI engineering require collective efforts to address. The day-to-day life of an AI engineer involves working on products or infrastructure and dealing with specialties and tools specific to the field.

I'm not here to tell you software engineering is ending soon. Nobody can put a reliable date on that, and pretending otherwise is a distraction. But we also have to admit something humbling: a year ago, most of us would not have predicted coding agents would be this good. That should make us less confident about predicting what they'll be able to do one year, or five years, from now.

So let's use "The Last Software Engineer" as a thought exercise. If AI keeps taking over more of the implementation work, what remains most human and valuable for us to do? In this talk, we'll take one step back from the hypothetical end and focus on the durable skill that has always separated great engineers from merely productive ones: judgment.

The future belongs not to people who only know how to build, but to people who know what should be built. We'll talk about product engineering, accountability, trade-offs, constraints, evaluation, and how to keep making software worth having in an AI era.