Speaker
Abstract
After almost 2 years of intense attention givent to coding assistants, at the beginning of 2025, many organizations were disappointed by the measurable results. The recent arrival of coding assistance agents though has stirred up and reset expectations and the hype.
This presentation gives an overview of the tooling and features in AI coding assistants today, and what new workflows they enable. It will particularly focus on the new agentic assistants that have brought us the vibe coding meme. How do they work? Are they replacing developers? What does this do to code quality? This whirlwind tour of the AI tooling landscape is based on Birgitta's experience as Thoughtworks' full time global SME for AI-assisted software delivery.
Topics
QCon London 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
Part of the track
Engineering Productivity and Developer Experience Hosted by Blanca Rojo Executive Director, Distinguished Engineer and Cloud Engineer @UBSFrom the same track
Monday 7 April
10:35 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session developer productivity Productivity Is Messing Around and Having Fun Holly Cummins, Trisha Gee Developer satisfaction, developer joy, and business results are strongly correlated. Developer productivity frameworks like SPACE recognize this, with Satisfaction being a key metric. And yet - our jobs are frustrating, filled with mindless work, and free of joy. How do we fix that? 11:45 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session pair programming Continuous Delivery Is Not Possible Without Pair Programming: Lessons From SpareBank 1 and SINTEF in Norway Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom, Ola Hast In the autumn of 2021, SpareBank 1, one of the largest savings banks in Norway, decided to take a new direction by significantly increasing how often we deployed to production, going from daily to hourly frequency. 13:35 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session Platform Engineering Achieve Optimal Efficiency for your Developer Experience Teams Fabien Deshayes Engineering Manager - Platform & Developer Experience @Monzo, Previously @Spotify Developer Experience teams are quite popular these days as organisations understand the value of optimising for developers productivity. 14:45 Fleming (3rd Fl.) Session Coding From Autocomplete to Agents: AI Coding State of Play Birgitta Böckeler Global Lead for AI-assisted Software Delivery @Thoughtworks, Software Developer, Architect, and Technical Leader, 20 Years Experience in Technology After almost 2 years of intense attention givent to coding assistants, at the beginning of 2025, many organizations were disappointed by the measurable results. The recent arrival of coding assistance agents though has stirred up and reset expectations and the hype. 15:55 Churchill (Ground Fl.) Session Your Platform is Not an Island: Embracing Evolution in Your Ecosystem Rachael Wonnacott Associate Director for Container Platform Engineering @Fidelity International As with most forms of engineering it is easy to talk about theory in the abstract, but typically more nuanced to implement. Platform engineering is no exception. While the term has become increasingly popular over the last few years, it is a concept that is organically evolving within industry. 17:05 Rutherford (4th Fl.) Unconference Unconference: Engineering Productivity and Developer Experience