I’ve been writing software professionally for almost 20 years, driven by a genuine love for writing code — and a growing realization that the value of our work was never the code itself, but the problems it helped us solve.

This talk is not about how AI models work internally, nor about the latest tools. Instead, it looks at what the rise of AI reveals about how we already build software — and why many of the things AI needs to work well are things we should have been doing all along. I’ll reflect on how values like clear structure, explicit rules, readable code, and well-defined boundaries have slowly replaced cleverness and micro-optimizations as the foundation of good software. I’ll also argue that AI is best understood as another abstraction layer — powerful and imperfect, and entirely dependent on the structure, constraints, and context we provide.

Finally, I’ll talk honestly about the mixed emotions this shift brings: the discomfort of writing less code by hand, the relief of letting go of work that never truly mattered, and what it means to still love coding when writing code is no longer the hard part. This talk is for developers who care deeply about software craftsmanship, and who want a clearer mental model for their role in the age of AI. You’ll leave with a clearer mental model for how to design systems, write code, and lead teams in a world where AI is part of the development process.

Jfokus

A conference talk by a CTO and co-founder reflecting on a 30-year journey with coding — from clever tricks and competitive programming to writing maintainable team code. The central theme is how AI is changing the role of the developer: AI acts as a mirror exposing poorly documented codebases, and represents the next abstraction layer between human intent and machine execution. The speaker argues that the hard parts of software development (problem definition, scope, trade-offs) remain human work, while the typing itself becomes less central. Developers will still need to understand code to guide AI effectively, but the craft may shift from writing to directing.

A Love Letter to Code – What Happens When We Stop Writing Most Of It Ourselves? By Henrik Ygge