AI-Enabled Building: Let the Robot Do the Work
NewTheory is great, but what about getting your hands dirty with some real problem-solving? Lets build your own AI Operating System that you'll take home and use immediately. Join Melissa Benua and Ryan Lee for a hands-on session where you'll construct a personalized AI toolkit that solves YOUR specific testing problems, regardless of your coding background. We'll start by deconstructing the modern software development lifecycle used by all tech companies to safely ship software solutions to their customers, and show you exactly where AI accelerates each phase. Then we'll prove a critical insight: code is now cheap. AI can generate functions, test cases, and deployments in seconds. What's expensive? Knowing what problem to solve and how to verify it's solved correctly. That's where product knowledge become invaluable.During this tutorial, you'll build your AI-OS, a configured, customized environment with prompts, workflows, and integrations tailored to your day to day challenges. Through live exercises, you'll use it to generate solutions from scratch (no prior coding required), refactor legacy test suites in minutes instead of days, create data generators on demand, debug failing tests by having AI explain root causes, and transform vague requirements into executable software. This isn't about organizational transformation or governance frameworks. It's about YOU walking out with a working system ready for Monday morning. You'll see how your job evolves when anyone can write code: from script-writer to problem-solver. Bring your laptop and real problems from your day job. Leave with a functional AI-OS and skills that transform how you work.
Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role - dev, test, DevOps, and engineering leadership - at companies ranging from Boeing and Microsoft to gaming startups and hypergrowth data platforms. She's built and scaled high-availability services for Bing, Cortana, Xbox, and PlayFab, and led the engineering teams that generated millions of lines of AI-written code per week at mParticle and Rokt while cutting bug escape rates by 20%. Today she serves as CTO at Vega and as a tech advisor through queenofcode.dev, helping founders from pre-Seed through Series A build and ship production software. Melissa speaks on engineering fundamentals in the agentic era: the planning, testing, CI, and observability disciplines that don't just survive AI velocity, but enable it. Her thesis - safety isn't the opposite of speed. It's the engine.
Ryan Lee is an executive, founder, and product leader with a background rooted in big data, artificial intelligence, and platforms. He’s launched products for iconic Silicon Valley brands, founded a Marketplace platform company helping next-generation marketplaces compete against Amazon and Walmart. He’s now an Ai enthusiast helping organizations navigate how to use Ai, where to apply it, and the tools necessary to equip teams to super-scale their productivity.