The world of software engineering and AI meets in the Bay Area this September

The last two years rewired how software gets made. AI went from autocomplete to writing entire features, and autonomous agents now build and ship software with barely a human in the loop.

Every engineering organization on the planet is asking the same question: what does this mean for how we build?

Yet most of that transformation has happened in prototypes and pilots, where nothing that breaks matters actually.

That phase is ending. AI is moving into real production systems, and with it come the questions that decide whether any of this holds up: how do you ship AI products that behave reliably when the AI itself doesn’t behave the same way twice?

How do you secure software that can be attacked in plain English? And how do you keep trusting the system when real users and real money are on the line?

This month, the people who have to answer those questions are in one room. WeAreDevelopers World Congress, running September 23-25 in San José, CA, brings the frontier labs together with the platforms they run on and the enterprises that run on both: OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, AWS, SAP, Atlassian, and Microsoft, with Docker as presenting partner and the City of San José as host.

More than 10,000 attendees and several hundred speakers cover the full arc of how software gets built, shipped, secured, and scaled – with AI cutting across all of it.

The lineup is driven by the people running the industry and the enterprises built on it: Thomas Dohmke, former GitHub CEO and now CEO of Entire; Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit; Mark Cavage, President and COO at Docker; Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry; Leigh-Ann Russell, CIO and Global Head of Engineering at BNY; Daniela Dimitrova, VP IT and CIO at Mercedes-Benz North America; Justin Boitano, VP Enterprise AI at NVIDIA; and Kelsey Hightower, among many others.

What makes it rare is the mix: the leaders deciding where their engineering organizations go next, and the developers who’ll actually build it, in the same room.

For three days, both sides work through the same questions. And the through-line is the one shaping the rest of the industry right now: how you take AI out of the demo and land it, safely and at scale, in the real world.

TNW is an official media partner of WeAreDevelopers World Congress. As a reader, you get two ways in:

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