What the Best Engineers Built for Their Coding Agents

What is the most future-proof engineering skill to learn now with AI and Coding agents? Time is up for traditional development cycles as Agents shrink vulnerability exploit windows from 200 days to just 18 hours.In this video, IBM HashiCorp Field CTO Anna McDougall shares why brilliant engineers have been avoiding the single most resilient career path in tech and how it's time to change that. It's now part of what software engineering is becoming:Why 20% of software engineers are grieving hands-on IDE coding (and why manual code is becoming like carpentry)The #1 future-proof engineering specialty that protects your career as AI agents write more codeHow to stand out in interviews using the "Pumpkin" CV strategy, high-signal personal achievements, and human networkingWhy non-deterministic coding agents ignore skills.md files and why 88% of breaches come down to credentialsHow engineering leaders can implement deterministic runtime guardrails, workload identity, and scoped credentials at scaleWhether you are looking to future-proof your career or a software engineer navigating agentic workflows, you will walk away with a clear roadmap for what comes next.This episode was recorded at TechLead Conference. Join for the next edition of the event in Amsterdam on May 20: https://techleadconf.comGuest - Anna Mcdougall:https://www.linkedin.com/in/annajmcdougallTimestamps:00:00:00 - From 200 Days to 18 Hours: Why Time Is Up00:00:47 - What a Field CTO Actually Does Every Day00:03:53 - Why 20% of Engineers Are Grieving Hands-On Coding00:06:55 - Why Hand-Crafted Code Is Becoming Like Carpentry00:08:26 - The Most Future-Proof Engineering Skill Nobody Wants00:10:53 - How to Network by Becoming the Connective Tissue00:13:55 - How to Stand Out When AI Writes Every Resume00:18:31 - The "Pumpkin" Strategy to Be Remembered in Interviews00:22:25 - Why Brilliant Engineers Avoid This Career Path00:26:42 - Why Skills Files Are Not Enough for Coding Agents00:31:10 - Building Deterministic Guardrails Without Slowing Teams00:36:32 - Finding Your People in Engineering Leadership#SoftwareEngineering #CareerAdvice #AIEngineering

Meta Staff Engineer Sajal Rustagi reveals what Staff Engineers do that most don't and what the best engineers do differently to reach the top. While foundational behaviors like proactivity and ownership still separate growing engineers from stuck ones, leveling up today requires a completely new set of staff skills built around agents.In this video, we cover:The behavioral shift from IC4 and IC5 (Senior) to IC6 (Staff Engineer) at MetaHow top engineers treat on-call firefighting as a system-wide ownership opportunityWhy rotating between Engineering Manager (EM) and Staff IC sharpens your business and technical influenceTransitioning from Developer Experience (DX) to Agent Experience (AX) using MCP, Claude, and markdown contextThis conversation is for software engineers, senior ICs, and tech leads who want to learn the new staff skills required to multiply their impact and get promoted now.This episode was recorded at TechLead Conference, a conference for engineering leaders on adopting AI.Timestamps:00:00:00 - The New Staff Engineer Skills00:00:44 - 2 Behaviors That Separate Mediocre and Staff Engineers00:02:16 - How the Best Engineers Build an Ownership Mindset00:04:26 - What Staff Engineers Do Differently During On-Call00:06:26 - Senior vs. Staff Engineer: Expanding Your Sphere of Influence00:09:56 - Why Switching Between Manager and Staff IC Builds Better Engineers00:14:04 - Why Unblocking Engineers Now Means Unblocking Agents00:16:41 - Managing Multi-Agent Handoffs Without Losing Control00:19:02 - Shifting from Developer Experience to Agent Experience00:21:47 - Why the Empty Engineering Backlog Is Still a Myth00:25:03 - How to Build Custom Agent Workflows and Reusable Skills00:28:31 - The #1 New Skill Software Engineers Must Build Today00:31:10 - How Meta Engineering Culture Compares to StartupsGuest - Sajal Rustagi, Staff Engineer at Meta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sajalrustagi#StaffEngineer #SoftwareEngineering #EngineeringLeadership

How do senior engineers use coding agents on prod infrastructure when “make no mistakes” is just a polite request? Kerim Satirli (HashiCorp, an IBM company) explains why prompt rules don’t hold in production, and what he runs instead.In this video, we cover:How Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Contentful, Datadog, Okta, Cloudflare providers) evolved from open-source PRs to automated agent harnessesWhy AI skills files and “make no mistakes” prompts are only requests, and what replaces them in production pipelinesHow AI-generated pull requests are overwhelming open-source maintainers (and why projects like cURL are pushing back)Personalized “software factories”, spec-driven development (GitHub Spec Kit), and cutting AI documentation noise with BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front)What open-source Rust clones of Adobe mean for the future of SaaSFor infrastructure engineers, DevOps practitioners, and software architects who want to move past one-shot prompting and run coding agents on production infrastructure without losing control.Timestamps:00:00:00 - Why “Make No Mistakes” Is a Polite Request00:00:38 - How Open Source Terraform Changed Provisioning00:01:59 - Why API-First Services Matter Beyond AWS and Azure00:04:19 - How AI Agents Changed Terraform Provider Updates00:07:03 - Why “Make No Mistakes” Won’t Stop Your Agent00:10:31 - Bringing Determinism Back to Agentic Workflows00:13:07 - How AI Pull Requests Are Overwhelming Open Source00:15:41 - Why Every Engineer Is Building a Software Factory00:18:52 - Why AI-Generated Documentation Slows Down Humans00:23:12 - Using Agents to Filter Noise and Summarize Specs00:27:02 - Escape Hatches for Automated Terraform Applies00:29:03 - Where the Joy in Engineering Lives Now00:31:24 - Spec-Driven Development and the Return of Architecture00:34:51 - Open-Source Rust Clones, Reverse Engineering, and SaaS00:38:19 - How to Build Software Products People Actually WantGuest: Kerim Satirli, Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp, an IBM company.https://www.linkedin.com/in/ksatirli#Terraform #CodingAgents #DevOps

Lead Architect Carlos Kelkboom shares his rules for coding agents and how great engineers architect software with AI. One of the great ones is: he throws away generated code the moment he doesn't understand it. He breaks down why coding agents fail at iterative changes, why his main agent never touches files, and how he scaffolds projects for one-shot execution.In this video, we cover:Why AI coding agents struggle with iterative changes (SlopCodeBench) and excel at one-shot executionHow to manually scaffold code, types, and folder boundaries before letting sub-agents runDesigning a distributed Markdown and indexed-search graph harness for progressive context disclosureUsing Git worktrees to run parallel coding agents and merge the best implementationsWhy dynamic memory and the heap need to disappear in favor of deterministic programming languagesHow AI bubbles and solo coding impact junior engineers and team collaborationThis episode is for software engineers, tech leads, and system architects who want to move beyond "vibe coding" and build maintainable, deterministic production software with AI agents.Connect with Carlos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlos-k-4016b8225Timestamps:00:00:00 - Why Carlos Throws Away Working AI Code00:00:53 - Why Pull Requests and Team Collaboration Are Dying00:03:50 - The Trap of Starting Projects You Never Finish00:06:06 - Escaping the Solo AI Developer Bubble00:11:54 - How to Scaffold Code Before Using AI Agents00:15:54 - Learning New Programming Languages With AI Agents00:21:14 - Why We Must Get Rid of the Heap00:28:32 - Building a Shared Language Across Engineering Teams00:31:31 - Vibe Coding vs Deep Software Engineering00:40:12 - Code Is Cheap: Git Worktrees for Parallel Agents00:41:45 - How Deep to Scaffold Before the Agent Runs00:45:09 - Democratizing Software, Missing Juniors, and the AI Bubble00:53:33 - Designing a Graph Harness for AI Agent Context00:58:18 - Why His Main Agent Never Touches Files01:03:07 - Throw Away Code You Don't Understand01:06:25 - Rethinking Code Reviews and Mutation Testing for AI#CodingAgents #SoftwareEngineering #AgenticEngineering

What happens when coding agents see your entire system: code, services, infrastructure and live traffic, all connected? Most agents are blind to everything outside the repo. Adyen Staff Engineer Mat Jones explains what changed once theirs weren't, and why he calls it somewhat scary.In this video, we cover:Running five or six coding agents in parallel with git worktrees and Atrium, an internal tool that lets agents coordinate and share memoryArchitect: nine connected graphs in Neo4j covering services, code, DNS, data stores and infrastructureIngesting 7 million trace spans a second with Kafka and Apache Flink, and what collapsed on the first trySentinel: anti-pattern monitoring, with agents that raise the fix as a merge requestMCP vs APIs vs CLI tools, and how to deal with tool bloatThis episode is for software engineers and platform teams who want coding agents to reason about real systems, not just the repo in front of them. You'll leave with a concrete place to start and an honest view of the risks.00:00:00 - Intro00:00:42 - Running Five Coding Agents in Parallel00:01:35 - Atrium: How Agents Avoid Stepping on Each Other00:06:57 - Why Graphs Save Coding Agents Tokens00:12:25 - What Is Architect? Nine Graphs in One Database00:16:54 - What Broke at 7 Million Spans a Second00:20:37 - The Timeline From Proof of Concept to Production00:27:59 - Tracing Code Changes to Critical Payment Flows00:30:26 - How to Start: Build Scrappy, Then Earn Buy-In00:35:07 - Making a Codebase Agent Friendly With Skills and Hooks00:42:07 - Why You Should Start With a Service Graph00:44:46 - The Downside of Everyone Seeing Everything00:48:34 - Sentinel: Agents That Find and Fix Anti-Patterns00:53:01 - Are We Going Too Fast With AI?01:01:55 - Two Engineers, Four Months: Why Big Bets Got Cheaper01:07:11 - MCP vs CLI Tools and the Tool Bloat ProblemGuest: Mat Jones, Staff Engineer at Adyenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mathewwjones#codingagents #softwareengineering #platformengineering

HumanLayer CEO Dexter Horthy, who coined "context engineering", on why AI agents degrade codebases over time. He breaks down a benchmark that measures AI code quality across features, and how his team ships with agents without drowning in slop.In this video, we cover:SlopCodeBench, SWE-bench and which coding benchmarks to trustToken maxing, dark factories and the "Instagram phase" of AI engineeringWhy 2-4x productivity beats chasing 100xPull requests, design docs and how engineers build taste nowDex's agentic engineering workflow: one-shots, overnight janitor bots and research-design-planFor engineers and engineering leaders adopting AI coding agents who want to know what's real and what works in teams at scale.Timestamps:00:00:00 - The Man Who Coined the Term: Context Engineering00:00:54 - SlopCodeBench: Proof AI Makes Codebases Worse Over Time00:05:49 - Background Agents and the Enterprise Friction Problem00:08:13 - Why You'll Never One-Shot a Big Feature00:11:18 - Scaling Agentic Engineering to 1,000 Engineers00:16:19 - Dark Factories, Fake Hype and Token Maxing00:19:55 - Why 2-4x Faster Beats Chasing 100x00:21:31 - Should Teams Stop Doing Pull Requests?00:24:20 - Can Deterministic Tools Replace Code Review?00:27:37 - How to Build Engineering Taste When AI Writes Code00:33:05 - Dex's Agentic Workflow: One-Shots and Janitor Bots00:35:18 - Research, Design, Plan: Shipping Big Features With Agents00:38:35 - Why Overnight Agents and Heavy Parallelism Backfire00:40:10 - Subscription Maxing vs Paying Per Token00:42:40 - Parallelize Like Poker, Not a Slot MachineDex Horthy: https://x.com/dexhorthyDex's talks and deep dives: https://aithatworks.bold.video#AgenticEngineering #AICoding #SoftwareEngineering

Amp ships to production around 50 times a day with AI agents, but the change that makes their team ship faster isn't AI at all. Dario Hamidi, AI engineer at Amp, makes the case that pull requests are holding your team back, and explains what replaces them.In this video, we cover:Why Amp works without pull requests or feature branches, and how to try it with your own teamAgent permissions, approval fatigue, and building environments where you can trust agentsOrbs: remote agent execution, parallelism, and multiplayer sessionsShort-lived credentials and workload identity federation for cloud agentsTriaging 60+ bug reports a day with agents without frying your brainFor engineers and engineering leads who want to ship faster with AI agents and are ready to question the workflows they've always used.Timestamps:00:00:00 - Is It Time to Kill the Pull Request?00:00:45 - What Happens If Every PR Gets Auto-Closed Tomorrow00:05:04 - Pull Requests Were Built for Strangers, Not Teammates00:07:20 - Does Dropping PRs Hurt Quality at Scale?00:08:53 - Agent Permissions: Why No Default Makes Everyone Happy00:12:42 - Don't Juggle Knives: Building Environments You Can Trust00:14:56 - The Hidden Hard Parts of Cloud Agents00:16:39 - What's an Orb? Remote Agent Execution Explained00:19:10 - How to Give Agents Credentials Without Leaking Secrets00:22:51 - Why Orbs Live Forever (and Multiplayer Orbs)00:25:49 - The State Management Problem Nobody Talks About00:29:22 - When Will Everyone Have Remote Dev Environments?00:32:23 - Orbs That Spawn Orbs: Orchestrating Agents at Scale00:34:42 - How Dario Triages 60 Bug Reports a Day With Agents00:39:23 - Avoiding Burnout When Agents Remove the Ceiling#AIAgents #SoftwareEngineering #PullRequests

How do top engineers still get hired in 2026 when most applicants get ghosted, 120,000 people have been laid off this year, and hiring managers say they can't find talent? A recruiter, a hiring lead, a career coach and an open source engineer explain why your resume is dead on arrival when every CV looks the same, and what actually gets you in the room instead.In this episode, we cover:Why 120,000 tech layoffs and 60,000 open engineering roles exist at the same timeWhy only 20% of LinkedIn messages get a reply, and how to write the ones that doWhy one hiring team bans AI tools in interviews and is building an agentic coding session insteadAdaptability and resilience: the two soft skills that keep you in the roomGetting hired through GitHub, referrals and open source when your CV can't stand outWhether junior engineers still have a path, and which engineering cohort is at risk in 3 to 5 yearsTitles vs scope: how to grow when your title never changesFor software engineers, students about to graduate, and anyone in tech who wants to know what recruiters and hiring managers are actually filtering on right now.Timestamps:00:00:00 - Intro: 1,000 Layoffs a Day00:00:47 - How Bad Is the Tech Job Market in 2026?00:02:05 - Why 120K Layoffs and 60K Open Jobs Don't Add Up00:03:40 - Why AI Tools Are Banned From Interviews00:06:28 - Hard Skills Get You In, Soft Skills Keep You There00:09:20 - "I'm a University Dropout": How GitHub Got Me Hired00:10:18 - CVs Are Too Good Now: Why Referrals Win00:13:04 - How to Get Your Open Source PR Merged00:15:02 - Why 80% of Your LinkedIn Messages Get Ghosted00:16:51 - How Open Source Led to a HashiCorp Job Offer00:19:15 - Is There Still a Place for Junior Engineers?00:22:00 - The Engineers Who'll Be Obsolete in 3 to 5 Years00:24:20 - Should You Contribute to Open Source at All?00:26:05 - AI Skills Required, Algorithms Still Tested00:27:54 - Stop Chasing Titles: Scope, Impact and Owning Your Career#softwareengineering #techjobs #careeradvice

Jordan Tigani helped create Google BigQuery, then got fired as Chief Product Officer on a Friday morning. He planned to hack on DuckDB to learn Rust. Investors offered to fund it before he'd decided to start a company. That company became MotherDuckIn this episode, we cover:The DuckDB Labs partnership: why MotherDuck gave the open-source creators a co-founder share instead of going open-coreFrom alpha to paid product: 11 founders, 3 to 4 months to alpha, two years to something people would pay forAI on top of the data warehouse: vibe-coded dashboards (Dives), pipelines (Flights), a context layer (Guides), and why business users catch mistakes analysts missAre dashboards dead? Jordan wrote "Big Data Is Dead"; his answer on dashboards is differentCareer advice: why you shouldn't want to work on the query optimizer, and the skill Jordan says matters moreFor engineers curious about database and infrastructure companies, open-source business models, and how AI is changing who gets to ask questions of data.Timestamps:00:00:00 - Intro00:00:32 - Fired on a Friday: how MotherDuck accidentally started00:04:50 - Giving DuckDB Labs a co-founder share of the company00:07:43 - Why most open-source SaaS products are just "managed"00:09:31 - Why VCs said yes: Snowflake, DuckDB, and BigQuery credibility00:10:50 - The 11-person founding team that skipped the wrong designs00:12:20 - Alpha in 4 months, beta in a year, paid in two00:15:20 - Vibe-coded BI: Dives, Flights, Guides, and an agent harness00:20:10 - The questions business users ask that analysts never do00:24:14 - Are dashboards dead in the age of agents?00:27:57 - Everybody wants to work on the optimizer (don't)00:31:23 - The engineer superpower most engineers look down on00:33:20 - Writing: the one skill Jordan would learn (and still hates)00:36:05 - Does contributing to DuckDB get you hired at MotherDuck?00:37:20 - Why a database company leaned into the duck#MotherDuck #DuckDB #SoftwareEngineering

Niantic Spatial CTO Brian McClendon on how the best engineers solve problems most give up on — from a 4D model of the world to shipping research in months. He built Google Earth and ran Google Maps for over a decade, and he's been there, done that. What he's building now is harder, and it's already live for customers. Along the way: who makes it on his team and who doesn't, and the one piece of advice he'd give every engineer using AI.In this video, we cover:- The 4D model of the world: visual positioning, change detection, and treating a pile of photos like a database- Gaussian splats and real-to-sim: capturing a room and loading it into Nvidia Isaac to train robots- Turning a research idea into a production service in six months- What Google Maps taught him about building for robots instead of humans- Designing problems AI can self-check, and why token maxing is a wasteFor engineers and engineering leaders who want to work on problems that don't have a known answer yet — and who want to know what a CTO who's built the definitive product in his field looks for in the people he hires.Recorded at the AI4 conference 2026. Timestamps:00:00:00 - Google Earth? Been There, Done That00:00:46 - Turning a Research Idea Into Production in 6 Months00:02:37 - How Any Photo Gets Located Within Half a Meter00:06:37 - The Long-Term Goal: A 4D Model of the World00:08:37 - Treating a Pile of Photos Like a Database00:11:58 - What Google Maps Taught Him About Training Robots00:15:22 - Gaussian Splats Explained in Plain Terms00:17:42 - The Unsolved Problem: Scale and Semantic Change00:20:34 - Why Google Earth Is Good Enough00:22:09 - Who Makes It on His Team and Who Doesn't00:23:38 - Designing Problems AI Can Self-Check00:26:03 - The Insights Hidden in the Physical World00:28:18 - Digital Twins, Cities, and Ready Player One00:31:35 - Visual Positioning When GPS Gets Spoofed00:33:24 - Token Maxing Is Bullshit: Advice for EngineersGuest: Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial. The engineer behind Google Earth; ran Google Maps for over a decade.https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianmcclendon#NianticSpatial #GoogleEarth #SoftwareEngineering