The Engineering Job Is Changing. Are You?

The way we build software is shifting faster than most teams realize, and the gap between using AI well and getting burned by it is wider than it looks. We share a clear-eyed view of where developers really stand in 2026, a framework for navigating the shift, and hard-won lessons from real projects.
The skills that made you valuable yesterday may not be the ones that keep you there.

It's All One Loop: A Field Guide to Claude Code's Building Blocks

You've met them all: Skills, subagents, MCP, hooks, CLAUDE.md, rules, permissions, plugins. And every time, you've guessed which one to reach for. The docs explain each on its own, never how they relate, so we treat them as rivals and pick wrong.

Leave this talk with one mental model that ends the guessing. The whole trick: everything Claude Code does is a single loop, and every building block is just a different place you plug into it. See the loop once, with a real example for each block, and you stop memorizing eight tools and start reading one map, including the single distinction that settles most "which one do I use?" questions on the spot.

You'll also catch the gotchas the docs skip over, the ones that quietly cost you an afternoon, and walk out with a one-page cheat-sheet you can use the same day.

A 30 to 45 minute talk.

Audience: developers already building with Claude Code who keep hearing about Skills, Agents (subagents), MCP, hooks, CLAUDE.md and plugins, and cannot place them against each other.

The one thing they should leave with: these are not competing tools you pick between. They are composable layers, and each one answers a different question. Once you know the question, you know which one to reach for.