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I’ve often told the story of how it was an interest in AI that, as much as anything else, that drew me to computer science in the 1980s. That was the era of expert systems and symbolic logic. Our final-year elective—the first and only time AI was covered in my degree—was, from memory, almost entirely about hill-climbing algorithms.

But what excited me, like many (perhaps most) in the field, was the promise of Artificial General Intelligence—AGI.

Since the 1960s, AGI has always seemed just a few years away. Various breakthroughs—from rule-based systems and expert systems to neural networks, deep learning, and more recently the Transformer architecture and generative models—have each felt like the one that might finally deliver on the dream.

They haven’t. At least not yet. (And while the jury is still out on generative AI, I remain skeptical.)

But these breakthroughs have undeniably delivered powerful, valuable tools.

None more so than generative AI. And arguably, the greatest impact we’re seeing right now is in software engineering.

“Vibe Coding,” a term coined by Andrej Karpathy, went from a novel concept to a buzzword to near-meaninglessness in a matter of weeks. And while code generation via LLMs is undeniably valuable and fast-evolving, software engineering is far more than just writing code. It’s architecture, testing, security, debugging, documentation, collaboration, and more.

As someone who has identified as a software engineer for decades, it’s this broader landscape—the question “What is software engineering in an era of LLMs?”—that really interests me.

A few weeks ago, we ran an unconference in Melbourne to explore this question. We’ll do it again next week in Sydney.

Introducing Engineering AI

But we think this deserves a proper conference.

So today, while it’s still early days, we’re announcing Engineering AI—a brand-new conference for software engineers, and engineering leaders and managers, to examine the impact of AI and LLMs on the practice of software development.

No vendor pitches. No handwaving. No “game-changing” fluff. Just peers sharing real-world experiences and practical insights.

Whether you’re skeptical or all-in on AI adoption, we hope you’ll join us—in person in Sydney, or online via Conffab—for Engineering AI.