Agentic Coding After Hours, Amsterdam
AI is changing software development. We're really excited and intrigued by the future of it:
Maybe you are building software with AI?
Or building tools that build software with AI?
Then this meetup is for you. No product pitches, all experience from the trenches. And it's becoming a tradition now, if you're attending the CNCF Agentic Day & Kubecon this is the perfect after party!
Kindly hosted by the awesome folks at Booking.com
Program:
17:00 internal opening + welcome speakers+ try
17:30 Venue opens
18:15 - Quick introduction and welcome word
18:30 - Talks: ~ 3 x 15 min
The context development lifecycle (CDLC) - Patrick Debois
The Humans Architect the System, the AI Writes the Code - Paul Stack
More speakers to be announced soon
19:15 Networking + Drinks and snacks available
21:30 THE END
The context development lifecycle
Patrick Debois is a practitioner, researcher, and eternal learner exploring how AI agents are reshaping software development — not just for individuals, but for teams and organizations. As independent advisor, Product DevRel lead at Tessl, and curator of ainativedev.io, he studies AI-native development patterns, context engineering, and how the context flywheel turns everyday coding into organizational knowledge. He accidentally coined the term DevOps in 2009 by organizing the first DevOps Days, and co-authored the DevOps Handbook — always drawn to the same question: how do teams get better, together?
Patrick Debois, Developer Advocate at Tessl
He organizes AI Native DevCon, is a frequent conference speaker known for knowledge-packed talks, and shares his ongoing research through talks, workshops, and his blog on jedi.be. His current work centers on context engineering, the Context Development Lifecycle (CDLC), and the organizational patterns that emerge when AI agents become teammates.
The Humans Architect the System, the AI Writes the Code
At System Initiative, we don't write code. Not because we can't — because we decided not to.
Every line of code in our new project, swamp, is generated by an LLM operating within strict design guidelines we've crafted and maintained. We don't accept pull requests but we happily accept contributions. If you want to contribute, you open an issue, we discuss the problem, refine the design together and let the AI build it. This keeps the supply chain intact and trustworthy. That's not a gimmick, it's the thesis made real. This talk is about what it actually looks like to run an engineering team this way — the discipline it requires, the design guidelines that make it work, and what we learned building swamp: an AI-native automation CLI for operations teams.
What we've learned is that the quality of what the AI produces is a direct reflection of how well you can express what you want. Vague guidelines produce vague code but sharp constraints produce good code. That's true for swamp, and it's true for how we build swamp.
We'll cover:
Why we made the decision to stop writing code and what changed when we did
How design guidelines replace pull requests as the primary contribution mechanism
What "architecture-first" means in practice when an LLM is your entire engineering team
How swamp applies those same principles to operations — and why that matters as AI starts driving infrastructure decisions
How AI gives you back the work you got into this industry to do — systems design, not syntax
The future of software isn't humans writing less code, it's humans getting better at expressing what they want. We're living that experiment in the open, come see what we've learned!
Paul Stack, Director of Product at System Initiative
Paul Stack is an infrastructure coder and has spoken at various events throughout the world about his passion for continuous integration, continuous delivery and good operational procedures and why they should be part of what developers and system administrators do on a day to day basis. He believes that reliably delivering software is more important as its development. Paul’s passions are the DevOps and Continuous Delivery movements and how they help the entire business and its customers.
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