Drupalcamp Kortrijk 2026

AI Mid-Life Crisis: failure stories from the silent majority

Description
Developer community is currently split into three uneven camps:

  • The Skeptics who refuse to touch AI on principle.
  • The Champions who seem to be rewriting Facebook every afternoon just to prove a point.
  • The Silent Majority - those who want to use new tools but feel so far behind the "Champions" that it’s discouraging to even start.

If you belong to that third group, you’re likely suffering from an AI Mid-Life Crisis. You’ve seen the polished stage demos where AI generates a perfect migration script, but when you tried it, you got a hallucinated mess of Drupal 7 hooks and broken YAMLs.

It’s time to talk about the "Failure Stories."

This session isn't a "how-to" on prompt engineering.
It's an honest discussion on what happens when AI fails in the real world of Drupal development - and what we can do about this.
We’ll discuss why feeling "behind" is a trap, why the 10x developer myth is toxic for team morale, and how we can bridge the gap by being more transparent about our struggles.


It's important to tell that (sometimes) AI fails for us too - and what we do about it.

The speaker's profile picture
Valery Lourie

Former Drupal core contributions mentors coordinator,
co-maintainer of AI and examples modules on drupal.org

The speaker's profile picture
daften

Dieter has over 18 years of experience with Drupal. Having worked on projects of all sizes and in various technologies, there is no project he can't tackle. As technical director, he is now supporting the operations teams of Dropsolid to go to the next level.