Agenda

The 10× Boost: AI, Judgment, and the Future of the Software Engineering Profession

Main Stage | Day 1 — 45 minutes Artificial Intelligence Software engineering Real case studies

AI‑assisted coding has delivered a dramatic productivity boost. Engineers can now generate working code, tests, and infrastructure at a pace that was unthinkable just a few years ago. But faster code does not automatically translate into better software. In this talk, Sushant Rewaskar examines how AI is reshaping the software engineering profession by shifting the true bottlenecks away from coding itself and toward judgment, system understanding, and delivery discipline. As code generation becomes cheap, the scarce skills move upstream and downstream: problem framing, architectural decisions, risk assessment, validation, and operating complex systems in production.Drawing on industry experience and recent research, the talk explores why AI disproportionately amplifies senior engineers—those who can recognize subtle failure modes and make sound tradeoffs—while simultaneously putting the traditional path from junior to senior engineer at risk. If organizations rely on AI to replace early‑career work without rethinking how engineers are developed, the profession risks eroding its own future expertise.The session concludes with how Microsoft and the broader industry must adapt: rethinking hiring, training, and career development to intentionally grow judgment, not just code output. The future of software engineering will be defined less by how fast we write code, and more by how well we decide what should be built—and whether it truly works. Read More...

• Sushant Rewaskar [Technical Fellow, Azure Core Compute — Microsoft]