Stuart Caborn
Distinguished Engineer at loveholidays
Newbury, United Kingdom
Actions
Stuart has been a technologist for 30 years, spanning roles in security, agile consulting, finance, and now travel at loveholidays. He is fascinated by how company structures, ways of working, and system designs shape each other. As a Distinguished Engineer at loveholidays, Stuart leads the Boost team, helping engineering teams navigate complex technical and organisational hurdles. Working at the coalface, Stuart focuses on finding better ways for humans, technology, and AI to work effectively together.
Area of Expertise
Topics
Make our services boring! Building a culture of zero surprises
Agentic coding offers faster delivery, but how do we keep moving fast without increasing outages that damage the business and drain engineering capacity? This talk shares the experience of loveholidays (https://www.loveholidays.com/de), where doubling our delivery cadence made reducing incidents and their associated toil a priority. Our hypothesis was that persistent errors and noisy developer feedback made new problems harder to recognise.
We took the approach of role modelling a zero-surprises culture at senior individual contributor levels:
- all surprises shall be known
- all surprises shall be resolved
- no surprise shall be allowed to continue to occur indefinitely
Following a proof of concept within our centre of excellence, we spread the practice through our staff engineer community, building executive and grassroots support.
Using a shared collaboration model, engineers shaped our process and drove adoption. They helped define the measures, established daily improvement habits and investigated beyond their core systems. Following errors across team boundaries brought questions of technical, cognitive and intent debt into focus. Making the work visible encouraged others to help and created opportunities for learning across teams.
Recorded production errors fell substantially, with fewer recorded incidents alongside increased delivery. Engineers reported improved shared context and system understanding. The talk will share quantitative results on engineering outcomes and qualitative experiences of our engineers, alongside the business and engineering benefits observed.
Our conclusion is that, in the age of agentic AI, strong human understanding of our systems remains critical to good system governance. We’ll consider how the approach links to Peggy Storey’s triple debt model: retaining virtuous friction and communication between engineers and teams helps improve shared understanding and maintain a shared model of system design, resisting cognitive and intent debt alongside tackling the technical debt exposed by “surprises”. We’ll share the organisational challenges we overcame during implementation, what we learnt, and how it is possible to move towards a zero-surprises system architecture.
Do We Really Need a New Playbook for AI?
loveholidays has been scaling AI-assisted development, with code committed with AI assistants now accounting for nearly 70% of our output.
In the same period, our code health has improved every quarter and deployments to production are up over 20% year-on-year. The challenge for our engineers was to maintain and improve quality while increasing productivity through AI-based innovation.
A year into our journey, we are finding that our existing engineering principles hold but the practices need adapting. This session will explore what it means for a codebase, team, and function to be "AI-Ready", structured around three areas of practice: guardrails, process, and knowledge. We'll examine how each area has evolved under agentic development, and the tension between established approaches and the adaptations we see emerging.
We will share the patterns our teams are using to make AI-assisted development work at scale: code health guardrails embedded in the agentic loop, build pipeline optimisations that prevent CI/CD from becoming the bottleneck, and approaches to encoding organisational knowledge into agent skills and data products that reduce guesswork and rework.
MCP Conference London Sessionize Event
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top