SaaS Pizza Night - CTO edition

​Code, cost and craft: engineering leadership in the AI era

​Most engineering teams have crossed the point of no return. AI writes a serious share of the code, the tooling bill looks nothing like it did a year ago, and the roles inside the team are quietly shifting.

​What's missing is the conversation about what that actually means day to day. How much code do you let through, and on whose review? What is a normal token budget per developer? And what does an engineering team look like when writing code is no longer the bottleneck?

​This evening brings together technical founders, CTOs and engineering and product leaders for a short opening session and three hands-on roundtables. Two rounds of 35 minutes, so you pick the two topics that matter most to your company right now and spend them in a small group with peers dealing with the same questions.

​Details:

​When: 2 September 2026, 17:30 - 20:30
Where: Rentman, Utrecht
Language: English
Who: technical founders, CTOs, engineering and product leaders
Cost: free, by application (seats are limited and we review every registration)

​Agenda:

​17:30 - 18:30 Walk-in, pizza & networking
18:30 - 19:00 Opening + opening presentation
19:00 - 19:35 Roundtables, round 1
19:35 - 20:10 Roundtables, round 2
20:10 - 20:30 Drinks & networking

​Roundtables

​1. AI-code governance: code quality when most code is written by AI

​Your team ships more code than anyone can meaningfully read. Where do you draw the trust line with coding agents, and what still needs a human gate? Discussion on review practices that survive the new volume, what automated quality and security scanning does and doesn't catch, how you spot AI-generated code that nobody really owns, and how you keep maintainability a management-level number instead of a gut feeling.

​2. Token budgets, policies and guidelines

​Nobody wants to be the first to say what they spend. So let's say it. What is a realistic budget per developer per month, and do you cap it per person or per role group? What happens when a runaway loop burns through it in an afternoon? Discussion on budget models, alerts and caps, the business case you tell your CFO, the choice between public APIs and private hosting, and which policies keep sensitive data out of tools you never approved.

​3. From engineers to builders: the new reality of software programmers

​When product managers and designers push code, and engineers spend their days on architecture and problem selection, what is an engineering team? Discussion on how roles are actually shifting, what happens to junior engineers when the learning path disappears, how you hire and assess for this, and the gap opening up between the people who adapted fast and the people who didn't.

​Applying

​Registration is by application. Tell us who you are and what you're working on, and we'll confirm your seat by email. We keep the group small so every table stays a conversation.