AI has made writing code dramatically faster. Unfortunately, it has also made it dramatically easier to create technical debt at scale.

While everyone is focused on prompt engineering and code generation, the software qualities that truly determine long-term success haven't changed. Readability, maintainability, adaptability, reliability, testability, and other critical "abilities" are what reduce the cost of change, accelerate delivery, improve resilience, and enable organizations to respond confidently to evolving business needs.

This session challenges the idea that AI changes what matters most in software engineering. Instead, it makes the case that AI amplifies both good and bad engineering practices—and that the most successful teams will be those that build software humans can understand, trust, evolve, and sustain long after the prompts have been forgotten.