Laura Tacho
What’s Next? How Agents Are Changing the Industry
Abstract: Agents are reshaping how software gets built, who builds it, and what an engineering organization needs to look like. The change is fast, the investment is heavy, and most leaders still don’t have a clear picture of what actually works. Laura Tacho brings the latest industry research to a big question: what’s happening to our teams and the software they ship now that agents are doing more work? What tools, skills, infrastructure, and processes lead to strong organizational results, and which ones end up with stalled productivity gains that never even reach the business? Beyond the codebase, agents are changing organizational design and what it means to be a developer. They’re also moving the line around who gets to create software, which raises new questions around maintainability and ownership. Meanwhile, new kinds of debt are emerging that leaders don’t yet know to look for.
Join Laura for a research-backed look at where the industry is heading, and practical guidance for preparing your teams for what comes next.
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Laura Tacho's Bio: Laura Tacho is a Senior Principal Technologist at AWS, where she focuses on developer experience and AI-native software development. Before joining AWS, she was CTO of DX, the developer intelligence platform, where she led its research and executive advisory programs. She co-authored the DX Core 4 framework for measuring developer productivity. Laura has spent around 15 years building developer tools, including some of the earliest tools in the Docker ecosystem. She has also led engineering organizations at CloudBees, Aula Education, and Nova Credit. As an executive coach and advisor, she has worked with thousands of engineering leaders, from startups to Fortune 500 companies, on using data to measure and improve team performance. She also teaches a popular course on engineering metrics and team performance. |