2025-09-21 –, Main stage
We are in uncharted territory. LLM based tools are everywhere, but they are hard to reason about - there is a lot of hype, a lot of noise, and very little signal. We, as individuals and as a community, need to adapt to a future that is very hard to envision.
We are in uncharted territory - LLMs and "AI" based tools are everywhere, embedded in so much of what we do, but they are not well-understood by most. If you try to get your head around what is possible with these things then you are faced with a barrage of marketing-speak and ill-informed hype. There is some signal in the noise but it's very hard to stay on top of.
Technical folks struggle to find the signal in the noise, and many business brains get swept away by the hype (and by Zuckerberg's aspirational announcements... thanks Zuk). There are a few common archetypes that have emerged:
There's the AI-ate-my-job developer, the one-with-the-vibe junior, the embrace-ai-or-get-out CEO, the cathedral-building anti-slop senior, the vc-funding-focused entrepreneur, the not-on-my-watch IT gatekeeper. There are also people who seem to be doing things very sensibly, but it worth looking closely at the extremes - there are a lot of pitfalls to avoid, and wisdom to be adapted and adopted (#steal-like-an-engineer).
There are clear benefits to fast iteration and quick prototypes, and adopting LLM tools on complex brown-field projects often has mixed results. It's worth knowing about the (shifting) limitations of these tools, and the emerging best practices (which often look a lot like the best practices that emerged in the before-times). It is worthwhile to deeply consider safety-nets and guard-rails as we lean on these tools, we need to iterate on our approach to engineering rather than focusing on writing more code faster (LOC is a bad measure of productivity, we know this!)
The other thing we really need to think about and solve for as a community is: how do we play the long game. I'm pretty convinced that we will still need human software engineers for a long time to come, and good ones at that. Skill comes from experience and the junior developer job market is a bit of a dog show.
How should junior devs prepare for the future? And how should organisations adapt so that they have people that they can rely on 5 years from now? I have some opinions...
None
I started off working as a software engineer and technical leader across multiple startups. I then spent 5+ years in tech education.
Over the last half decade I have had the opportunity to work in the non-profit space and build alternative education systems from the ground up. The measure of success was employment - 95%+ of the students got good jobs, kept them, and got promoted. Getting this right meant understanding the hiring landscape.
I since founded Prelude.tech. Here I distill everything I have learned about teaching well. Prelude primarily focuses on advanced Python applications and critical soft-skills.