Speaker
Abstract
In 2009, every big enterprise said "continuous delivery won't work here." In 2026, the same rooms say "the dark factory won't work here." It was never about the technology being ready. It's about the organization being ready. Readiness is a socio-technical problem, not a technical one.
This talk applies Conway's Law all the way up, through four layers of enablement:
- 0. Enable the agent : this is where the tech is standing today (context + harness).
- 1. Enable the team : the new mentality of fixing the system instead of the code, the changing role, winning over skeptics, new planning/retro ceremonies, and measuring evolution by human-touches-down and sharing-up.
- 2. Enable the platform: the shared context, harness and infra substrate teams and agents both stand on: model routing, MCP gateways, sandboxes, skill/harness registries, evals, guardrails, paved roads that stay easy paths (not cages), and FinOps that optimizes rather than caps.
- 3. Enable the organization: the VP of Engineering's job: hiring and interviewing for the new roles, defending a maturing ROI, right-sizing teams, keeping humans able to judge in the "dim factory," and building the real moat : capturing knowledge.
Each level is a bigger lever than the one below it. Coding agents don't scale themselves. Neither do your teams.
Interview
Engineering leaders, platform/DevEx engineers, and senior ICs driving agentic-coding adoption. It's for anyone past "we gave them coding tools" and asking why it isn't scaling across the org.
$2,835, Conference (3 days). Current pricing ends September 8th. All pass options.
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.
Part of the track
Real World Platform Engineering Hosted by Daniel Bryant Platform Engineer, Co-Author of "Mastering API Architecture", Java Champion, and InfoQ News ManagerFrom the same track
Wednesday 18 November
10:35 Pacific DEKJ Session Why Most Platform Teams Fail: The Adoption Problem Nobody Wants to Own Shweta Vohra Architecture Leader @Booking.com, Author of "Decoding Platform Engineering Patterns" & "Dear Software and AI Architect", 24+ Years Experience Building Cloud, Platform, and AI Systems We have all seen the moment: the platform goes live, the launch deck looks sharp, the portal is polished, the golden paths are documented, and yet teams quietly continue doing things the old way. Not always because the platform is bad, but because adoption was assumed, not owned. 11:45 Pacific DEKJ Session The Rise of Agent Enablement: Coding Agents Don't Scale Themselves. Neither Do Your Teams. Patrick Debois AI Product Engineer @Tessl, Co-Author of the "DevOps Handbook", Content Curator at AI Native Developer Community In 2009, every big enterprise said "continuous delivery won't work here." In 2026, the same rooms say "the dark factory won't work here." It was never about the technology being ready. It's about the organization being ready. Readiness is a socio-technical problem, not a technical one. 13:35 Pacific DEKJ Session Building a Migration Platform: Moving 100+ Netflix RDBMS Workloads to Aurora PostgreSQL Ammar Khaku, Kshitij Gupta In late 2024, Netflix made a bet: consolidate the vast majority of our relational database use cases onto a single engine: Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. 14:45 Pacific DEKJ Session Platform Engineering’s Second Act: From Vending Machine to Passport Control Smruti Patel, Alex Mann Three years ago on the QCon SF stage, I made the case for “Acceleration, Autonomy, and Accountability” as the pillars of a successful platform. Those pillars haven't moved. AI has just rewritten what each one requires, and the platform team's job along with it. 15:55 Pacific DEKJ Session Decoupling Local Development from Remote Infrastructure Details coming soon.