The Fast, The Furious and The Fatigued

QCon San Francisco 2026

Sponsored session

The Fast, The Furious and The Fatigued

Wednesday Nov 18 / 01:35PM PST (50 minutes), Pacific LM at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

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$2,995, Conference (3 days)
Current pricing ends November 10th

Abstract

For years, achieving daily releases has been the gold standard of DevOps maturity. But what happens when you get there? According to new data from over 700 engineering leaders, high deployment frequency is increasingly masking a crisis of off-hours rework, instability, and engineer burnout.
As teams adopt AI coding assistants to accelerate development, the misalignment between automated code generation and a delivery process that requires even a small number of manual tasks is causing pipelines to fracture.
When "fast" relies on evening and weekend firefighting to get releases across the line, the system is running on borrowed time.
In this session, we dig into the survey data to uncover how legacy CI/CD is failing high-velocity teams, and chart a path forward with the ultimate ambition of building a fully autonomous delivery process.

Key takeaways: 
The Velocity Illusion: Why isolated high DORA metrics (like deployment frequency) can sometimes be a false positive for health and stability.
The Cost of Manual Touchpoints: How AI-accelerated development exposes the compounding risk of pipelines that still rely on even minor human interventions.
Paving the Way to Autonomy: Strategies for implementing automated governance, deployment verification, and progressive rollouts to remove human bottlenecks completely.
 

Sponsored session

Session sponsored by

Autonomous SDLC Platform that ships AI code as fast as it’s written, catches risk before it ships, and governs every pipeline

Register

$2,995, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends November 10th. All pass options.

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

QCon San Francisco 2026 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.

Slides & video

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Current pricing ends November 10th
$2,995, Conference (3 days)

Register