Directing a Swarm of Agents for Fun and Profit

QCon San Francisco 2025

Session Vibe Coding

Directing a Swarm of Agents for Fun and Profit

Monday Nov 17 / 05:05PM PST, Ballroom A at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

Abstract

Coding agents are a new tool, which many of us are trying to figure out how to use effectively. The domains that coding agents work well for is also expanding, and tools and best practices are evolving extremely rapidly, so it's hard to keep up and develop durable techniques and know whether you are in the zone or on thin ice. The approach I advocate is to dedicate an unusual amount of time to having fun with the tools, trying things out on personal projects and filter for things that seem to be working well to use for work projects. 

The work projects will usually complete extremely quickly and profitably if this approach is working well, and make time for some more fun projects. I've developed some durable techniques, like building and testing in Python first, then translating to whatever language you really wanted to use. Using Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) Given/When/Then structures for tests. 

Following Kent Beck's Tidy First mantra, and cleaning up before adding more functionality, etc. and I'll talk about what I've found to work, share the fun public projects I've been working on, and some thoughts on how organizational structures will be impacted by having development capacity be an on on-demand capability.

Topics

Vibe Coding Agentic AI/ML
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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