Wednesday
Room 1
13:40 - 14:40
(UTC±00)
Talk (60 min)
Being the Human in the Loop
From coding with more comprehensive autocomplete to coding with vibes, developers, teams and companies are increasingly adopting LLM assistance into their workflow. Many, however, are doing so without a clear sense of the trade-offs involved or full awareness of whether they are receiving meaningful benefits or just the benefit of illusion, to the point that some developers seem to be rapidly deskilling themselves and turning themselves into maintainers of code they didn't write.
We are told that as long as we keep a "human in the loop" it's all good. At one level, this advice seems sound — and even obvious — but it's as vague as it is unhelpful. What does it actually mean to be the human in the loop? It's clearly more than just LGTMing any generated code, but what skills and mindset are needed to make AI use effective? What does it take to be the driver, not the road?
This isn't a talk about tools, MCP servers or better prompts: it's a talk about understanding what productivity is and is not, the difference between value demand and failure demand, that typing is not the bottleneck in software development, that design and coding skills are important, that solutioneering the problem domain is not enough, that testing is not optional, that being able to generate and explore options has more long-term value than committing first-guess code.
Kevlin Henney
Kevlin is an independent consultant, trainer, speaker and writer. His development interests and work with companies covers programming, practice and people. He is a contributor to the Modern Software Engineering YouTube channel. Kevlin is also co-author of two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series, editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know, co-editor of 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know and former columnist for a number of magazines and sites.