QCon London 2026: AI Agents Write Your Code. What’s Left For Humans?

Hannah Foxwell's QCon London 2026 talk examines how agentic AI coding tools are reshaping development teams, not from a technical angle but from a human and organizational perspective. She presents three anchors for navigating this shift: building things worth building (as agents now outpace product backlogs), ensuring speed requires safety (citing AWS and JPMorgan Chase case studies on re-engineering paths to production), and keeping people central (shifting code review left to specs and architecture rather than PRs). She advocates for 'broken-comb' engineers with multiple areas of depth, smaller or restructured teams, and a more experimental product culture. Drawing on her own experience building a product in two weeks with Cursor in agentic mode, she encourages engineers to start experimenting now with both the tools and the organizational changes they demand.