Lessons Learned Building with AI: From Zero Trust to High Confidence

What does it take to go from skepticism to shipping production code with AI assistance? This talk chronicles my journey from zero trust in AI tooling to confidently integrating it into my daily development workflow—and the hard-won lessons learned along the way.

I'll share how I incrementally adopted AI over the last 18 months, starting with low-risk, high-value tasks like generating commit messages and automating pull request reviews, then building towards more critical use cases like generating comprehensive test suites, drafting application requirements, and eventually writing production code. Each stage taught me something new about where AI excels, where it fails, and how to structure my workflow to maximize success.

Attendees will leave this talk with a clear understanding of how to approach AI. You'll gain actionable strategies to thoughtfully integrate AI into your workflow, offload repetitive tasks, and dedicate more of your valuable time to solving complex problems and building impactful features. Whether you're skeptical or curious, you'll walk away knowing exactly how to start—and how to measure whether it's actually working for you.

Key Takeaways

• An understanding of how to adopt AI incrementally in your development workflow
• Objective criteria for evaluating AI tools beyond hype
• Patterns and techniques that increase acceptance rates

About the Speaker - Ryan Edge
Ryan Edge is a Google Developer Expert in Flutter and who is passionate about civic hacking and front-end development on mobile, desktop, and web platforms. He blogs somewhat regularly on hashnode. A native of Louisiana ⚜️ Currently residing in Charlotte, North Carolina, Ryan is a nerd jock 🤓🏃, an anime enthusiast, an epicure, and an advocate for equality ✊🏾 🦄.

Important Parking and Directions
The address for the Cabarrus Center is 57 Union St. S Concord, NC 28025. Free parking is available in the Cabarrus County Parking Deck located at 81 Spring St. SW Concord, NC 28025. There is also the 3-hour Bicentennial Lot behind our building. Here is a map of downtown parking options for your reference.

Sponsors

• FocalGroove provides groovy marketing and facilitation.
• Special thanks to Flywheel Coworking for providing our meeting space in their fantastic Concord facility!