Agentic engineering has quietly inverted the fundamental bottleneck of software development. For decades, the hard part was building, so we optimized teams for execution speed, hired specialists to cover capability gaps, and treated wasted work as a cost to be managed through careful planning and consensus. Now an engineer with the right tools can scaffold major features in hours, often faster than they can get a meeting on the calendar to discuss it. This talk is a field guide for leading teams through that inversion. It reexamines the hiring calculus, what makes an early career engineer...
Kat Styons
Senior Director
Yahoo
Kat Styons is a Senior Director at Yahoo, where she is building an agentic engineering team. She spent many years as an engineer and engineering leader at the Washington Post and has led multiple digital transformations, most recently at Yahoo News. Now with the shift to AI-native development, her current team has become a live experiment in the ideas she'll discuss on stage; a lean, cross-functional group learning what changes and what doesn't when you're building agentically.