Move Fast, Don’t Break Trust: Shipping Constantly with Humans and Beyond

QCon London 2026

Session Platform Engineering

Move Fast, Don’t Break Trust: Shipping Constantly with Humans and Beyond

Monday Mar 16 / 03:55PM GMT, Mountbatten (6th Fl.) at The QEII Centre, London

Abstract

Moving fast only works if your systems are engineered with trust and verification in mind. In this talk, we showcase how teams can scale to the point where shipping hundreds of changes a day becomes boring, routine, and safe. We will discuss investing in automated guardrails that make it easy to follow best practices across Monzo's 3000+ microservices and stay on the paved road. These include services that power all our payments infrastructure and our core banking ledger.

Then we push that same idea “beyond humans”. Agents can continuously write code, open pull requests, orchestrate migrations, and make changes. They work extremely well within these guardrails, but they also introduce new failure modes, resulting in subtle logic bugs, code that works but is hard to reason about, and a drastically increased rate of change. We'll dive deep into the additional investments we've made (and are considering) to make the feedback loop for agents as fast and as reliable as possible.

Key takeaways:

  • How to ship constantly without fear: the platform and process and guardrails that enable hundreds of deployments safely
  • Understand how we use our monorepo and broad corpus of microservices so that both humans and coding agents can maintain existing patterns and utilise the paved road
  • How we think about building and evaluating trust in the changes made by both humans and agents
  • Identifying the systems that will break first when writing code becomes an instantaneous activity. - the idea is to push the audience to see that bottlenecks will move elsewhere.


 

Topics

Platform Engineering tooling architecture software engineering Code Quality
76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon London 2026 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.

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