Austin CTO Luncheon: Software Development in the Agentic Age
Join us for a private lunch in a downtown Austin penthouse on Monday, November 16, co-hosted by Chris Beaman and Boris Portman. We're bringing together a curated group of CTOs, engineering leaders and technical founders for a candid conversation about how software gets built now that coding agents do most of the work.
The big question: what needs to change when humans are no longer the bottleneck? We'll cover token costs and model choice, running a dozen agents at once, merge conflicts, CI bills, and how to trust code you didn't write. Our speakers are two engineering leaders who have built, scaled and sold their own companies. They now run agent-driven development every day and will share what's working, what isn't, and what they'd do differently.
Join us for a thoughtful lunch, real insight from leaders shipping with agents, and conversation with peers facing the same challenges.
Agenda
12:00 - 12:30 PM · Welcome lunch and introductions
12:30 - 12:50 PM · Jonathan Ellis: Software Development in the Agentic Age
12:50 - 1:10 PM · Josh Arnold: Agentic Workflows in Practice
1:10 - 1:30 PM · Open discussion and networking
Speakers
Jonathan Ellis, Founder and CEO of SlopCop
Jonathan co-founded DataStax here in Austin, served as its CTO, and chaired the Apache Cassandra project. IBM acquired DataStax in 2025. He's now building tools for teams that let coding agents do the heavy lifting. His talk covers the setup he built along the way: running many agents from one control plane, letting an agent handle merge conflicts, cutting CI costs by up to 90%, and using mutation testing and static analysis to prove agent-written code really works.
Josh Arnold, CTO of BetterEngineer
Josh has spent more than 20 years building and scaling engineering teams. He co-founded TalentAdmin, a recruiting platform he later sold, and founded the tech consultancy TechWho. Before that he led IT at PeopleAdmin through its Inc. 500 growth years and moved its product to the cloud. Josh is the CTO of BetterEngineer, and he'll share how his teams use agentic workflows day to day: what they set up, what they had to rethink, and what's paid off.
About SlopCop
SlopCop is static analysis built for teams that use coding agents. It's fast enough to run on every edit an agent makes and deep enough for CI, so problems like SQL injection get caught before code is ever pushed. It follows data across files and runs on an open-source engine instead of a language model, so the same code gets the same results every time. It supports 13 languages. Founded and led by Jonathan Ellis.
About BetterEngineer
BetterEngineer helps companies build in the age of AI with US and Latin American based vetted expert forward deployed architects and engineers. Founded and led by Boris Portman, the company combines AI-powered recruiting with human expertise to help businesses identify, vet, and hire talent with greater speed and higher value outcomes.