AI won't fix Developer Productivity (Unless you fix Context First)

QCon San Francisco 2025

Sponsored session

AI won't fix Developer Productivity (Unless you fix Context First)

Monday Nov 17 / 01:35PM PST, Pacific LM at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

Abstract

AI coding tools promise productivity gains, but many teams aren’t seeing the impact.

The real bottleneck isn’t code generation. It’s context. Understanding why a system was built a certain way, how it evolved, and what trade-offs were made often requires digging through GitHub, Slack, Notion, Confluence, Jira, and other tools.

This talk explores the idea of context engineering: structuring and exposing relevant knowledge so both humans and AI agents can work more effectively. I’ll show how Unblocked creates a contextual layer across your tools, giving AI models like Claude and Cursor access to product decisions, architectural history, and team discussions.

The result is less hallucination, faster iteration, and fewer interruptions. You get AI that understands your system instead of just guessing.

If you’re using AI in production codebases, this is the foundation that makes it work.

Sponsored session

Session Sponsored By

Your developers know how to write code. What slows them down is the missing context to know what code to write. Unblocked gives engineering teams the answers they need to get their jobs done – without having to wait on or interrupt their teammates.

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon San Francisco 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

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