AI coding agents are changing what it feels like to be a software engineer. For a lot of us, that's challenging our sense of craftsmanship. If agents are writing the code, do we lose the joy of building?

I don't think so. The building moves up a layer.

In this talk, I'll share how I found that familiar engineering flow state again. Not by writing every line myself, but by designing agentic systems that still require the engineering principles we value: systems thinking, decomposition, separation of concerns, state management, etc.

The tools are different now, but the engineering discipline is still there. We'll walk through how to apply the engineering muscles you already have to a new set of building blocks.

If you've been wondering where your value goes in an AI native world, this talk will help you see that it hasn't disappeared. It's now at the system level.