Cris Ippolite is in San Francisco for AI Dev Day 2026, joined by Chris Moyer, Vince Menanno, Marcus Swift, and Kate Waldhauser for a live conference debrief. The conversation captures the mood coming out of the event: software development is changing fast, but the group is not buying a simple “developers are dead” story. Instead, they talk through a more nuanced shift where developers increasingly become managers, editors, architects, and reviewers of AI-generated work.
“Developer as manager” – is this a destination or just an awkward transitional phase? The panel compares today’s AI tooling to an early car: clearly transformative, but still missing some of the infrastructure, safety, polish, and shared expectations that would make it feel mature. That framing keeps the conversation grounded. Everyone can see the direction of travel, but the day-to-day reality is still early, uneven, and full of judgment calls.
The discussion also keeps returning to what FileMaker developers already understand well: data structure, full-stack thinking, business logic, interface design, and the ability to see how information moves through a system. Those skills become more valuable, not less, when AI can generate code or suggest architectures. The group talks about learning by taking apart AI-generated work, much like earlier developers learned by dissecting HyperCard stacks or FileMaker examples.
The conference itself seems optimistic about the future of software engineering, with panelists rating the outlook high rather than doom-filled. But the conversation does not ignore real concerns. The group talks about local models, hybrid cloud/edge architectures, latency, trust, cost, and the need for deterministic infrastructure around probabilistic models. “Responsible AI” is treated less as a special category and more as something that should become table stakes.
The takeaway is not that AI replaces the developer, but that it changes the developer’s leverage. (and then, eventually, I suppose, AI takes over the entire world)
The people who understand systems, data, users, and business processes are still needed; the tools are just giving them a much larger, stranger, faster team to manage.
New Zealand