Speaker
Peter Bell
Founder & CTO of Gather.dev, Host of the O'Reilly CTO Hour and the CNCF Executive Summits at KubeCon
Full speaker profileAbstract
It’s here. It’s just not evenly distributed.
As part of writing the O’Reilly book on Scaling AI Adoption in Engineering, I’ve spent the last year digging into the processes, practices and structure of the engineering orgs at Anthropic, OpenAI, Shopify, Coinbase, Ramp, Block and many more. This isn’t a survey talk. It’s a small number of deep conversations with the leaders furthest ahead, and I’ll share what’s actually changing in the structure of those orgs. There’s still plenty of experimentation, but good practices are starting to emerge for structuring and managing your engineering org in 2027 and beyond.
Should we all be builders or Members of Technical Staff? What’s the size and structure of the ideal agentic engineering team, and what are its rituals? How does engineering leadership change as we re-envision the software development lifecycle to be agent first? What makes a good agentic engineer, how do we attract and vet the best of them, and what’s the future for junior developers?
You’ll walk out with specific actionable strategies from the companies that are getting the very best from their agentic developers, benchmarks for what kind of pace you should expect from an agentic engineering org, a realistic understanding of the challenges that still exist and the preconditions required to maximize the reliable value you can get from your token burn, and a sense of the forces that will drive increasing automation in software development over the next couple of years.
Interview
Interview:
What is your session about, and why is it important for senior software developers?
The companies that are getting the best results from agentic engineering are re-envisioning the SDLC and the structure of the software engineering org. In this session we'll be looking at how the org and the SDLC are evolving and how senior engineers can best position themselves to thrive through this transformation/acceleration.
Why is it critical for software leaders to focus on this topic right now?
A small number of companies are effectively transforming their SDLC to be agent first. We're already starting to see credible reports of 5-10x acceleration in the teams that have invested in robust agentic generation, verification and operation/management of their code bases and it is going to be very hard to compete with such companies if your engineers are still reviewing every PR by hand.
What are common challenges developers and architects face in this area?
Agentic engineering is possible - but it is not easy. The models are getting good art generation, but verification of correctness, performance, security, cost and maintainability is still an evolving field. Adoption is also non-trivial. At most companies a small number of engineers are figuring out how to build and tune harnesses but the majority need structured support and mentorship to adopt effective agentic engineering practices.
What's one thing you hope attendees will implement immediately after your talk?
A personal plan to incrementally improve the rigor with which they engage with agentic engineering - technically and organizationally.
What makes QCon stand out as a conference for senior software professionals?
I've presented at many conferences around the world. QCon is my favorite conference because of the quality (maturity, competency and curiosity) of the participants. The speakers are great, but conferences are made in the hallway track. And QCon consistently has one of the best hallway tracks in the business.
What was one interesting thing that you learned from a previous QCon?
I still remember a great presentation from Mike Feathers at QCon NY back in 2014 when he was taking the idea of Microservices to the logical conclusion of lots of little tools - like unix - composable, and with limited side effects. QCon always brings great speakers that help you to rethink what's possible and how to move your org and your architecture to the next