AI coding tools are overhyped and powerful at the same time. Used well, they're extraordinary. Used badly, they'll bury you in spaghetti code faster than any human team could. The difference isn't the tool. It's the process. After 18 months of teaching developers to build with AI agents, Matt Pocock has watched the same patterns emerge: the devs who succeed aren't the ones who delegate everything or nothing. They're the ones who fall back on engineering fundamentals. In this talk, he shares the iterative process his students use to ship high-quality applications with AI agent swarms, and why the principles that make it work (ubiquitous language, vertical slices, TDD, deep modules) are decades-old ideas that didn't break. They got more important.

Speaker info:
- https://x.com/mattpocockuk
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/mapocock/

AI Engineer

A conference talk by Matt Pocock arguing that software fundamentals matter more than ever in the AI coding era. He critiques the 'specs to code' movement and the idea that 'code is cheap,' demonstrating through personal experience that repeatedly regenerating code without design oversight produces increasingly worse results. He presents practical techniques drawn from classic software books (A Philosophy of Software Design, The Pragmatic Programmer, DDD): a 'grill me' prompt to build shared design concepts with AI, a ubiquitous language skill to reduce verbosity, TDD to enforce small deliberate steps, and deep module architecture to keep codebases testable and navigable. The core thesis is that developers should act as strategic architects while AI handles tactical implementation.

It Ain't Broke: Why Software Fundamentals Matter More Than Ever — Matt Pocock, AI Hero @mattpocockuk