Opening keynote: from compilers to copilots

The day opens with David Anderson, Angela Timofte and Sheen Brisals on the evolution of software and the AI-powered future, all three familiar names from the serverless community. I'm expecting it to set up the rest of the day nicely, with a look at how we got from compilers to the copilots and agents most of us now work alongside, from people who've been building on AWS long enough to have seen a few of those shifts first hand.

AI-DLC and organisational context

One session I'm looking forward to is Matt Houghton's Context Over Code: Why AI-DLC Is an Organisational Transformation, Not a Productivity Hack. AI-DLC is the AI-driven development lifecycle AWS has been talking about, where AI takes a part in every stage of delivery rather than just writing the code. The title matches what we've found in our own work - the tooling is usually the easy bit to adopt, and the harder part is giving the models the context they need about how a business actually works, what's been decided and why, and where the boundaries are.

That context is a large part of why we built our knowledge OS, so the agents working on our projects know how we build, what's been planned and decided, and why. I'm keen to hear how Matt frames it for larger engineering organisations, where that context is spread across far more teams and systems than ours.

Looking back at my notes from Matheus's talk last year, I see quaint notes on ideas to "build an MCP server for Si Novi coding standards". It's incredible how far things have come in a short space of time!

Closing keynote: beyond software engineering

Ian Massingham, now at Anthropic, closes the day with a question we've been asking ourselves a lot this year - what should engineers do when writing code is the easy part? His answer is choosing the outcomes, making systems legible to models, and going beyond software to bigger and more impactful problems. That lines up closely with how our own days have shifted, with more of our time going on deciding what should be built and making sure the agents doing the work have what they need to do it well. Ian was a familiar face at AWS events for years, so it'll be interesting to hear the view from inside a model provider, drawing on the thousands of startups building on Claude.

Come and say hello

If you're going too, come and find us - we'll probably be in the Cottonsheds for the keynotes and in the Archives for the AI sessions in between. And if you can't make it, we'll share what we took away from the day afterwards.