Craft in the Time of Agents

You feel more productive than you’ve ever been. You put on the Iron Man suit and now you’re building things in hours that used to take weeks. And you’re exhausted by Wednesday. The craft that used to sustain you — the flow of writing code, the satisfaction of making something work — has given way to a middle loop of supervisory engineering: directing, evaluating, and correcting AI output. You’re getting more done while enjoying it less, and that’s a tension worth navigating. If the system is producing more output while eroding joy, that’s not a you problem, it’s a system design problem.

Drawing from her recently completed Masters research on AI’s impact on software engineering and conversations with practitioners and researchers at the frontier of this shift, Annie explores why this transition hits so differently for those entering the industry, those deep in it, and those who haven’t written code in years — and why who thrives most comes down to mindset, not circumstance. The good news is, that’s within your reach.

This talk offers a lens to see your own situation clearly, and a path through it. Joy and pride in work don’t happen by accident. They’re system outcomes. And we can engineer the conditions for them.