AI-Driven Software Development: Strategies, best practices, war stories

Valencia Codes would like to welcome you all to our #27 edition of Level Up at the offices of Deutsche Telekom.

What is Level Up? It's a monthly meet-up where we will be inviting speakers from inside and outside of our community to introduce you to interesting technical topics and share their experiences with you.

AI-Driven Software Development: Strategies, best practices, war stories

So at this point we're all brain-fried Claude addicts, but how well has this converted into shipping quality product?

We will be using a format called 'Fishbowl', a dynamic style of debate where a small group discusses a topic in an inner circle while others observe from the outside. Audience members can join the inner circle at any time, creating an open, evolving conversation.

In this discussion, I want us to open up and share how we develop software in our companies, but a layer deeper than the usual 'We gave all the devs Cursor licenses'.

Here are some of the things I want us to discuss:

- How are you incorporating AI in the design, architecture, testing, QA, or code review phases of the Software Development Life Cycle?
- Have you changed your team structure? For example from a sprint team of 6 to a team of 2-3
- What MCPs/custom skill/instruction files do you use if any?
- Are you using some framework like Spec-Driven Development?
- Have your product team/CEO started vibe coding? How do your channel their creative energy to help define requirements while avoiding them blowing themselves up by leaking secret keys in the frontend (or 1 million other destructive mistakes they might make)?
- How do make sure Junior engineers are learning the deep engineering skills they need and not just becoming copy-paste merchants?
- How do you stop your engineers getting brain rot? Can they still work without AI? Do you care?
- How do you handle cost? Are you token maxxing? Would you consider using a more token-efficient agent harness that is not created by token-provider e.g. instead of Claude Code or Codex, use Pi

and most importantly

- Are you shipping quality product faster? Are your customers delighted? How are you measuring this?

Each of us comes from different companies, with different stacks, different security requirements and different ways of working. So I think it's a super nice opportunity to share and learn on this sometimes overwhelming topic.

There is no agenda per se. The questions I pose above are just conversation starters, but we can take the conversation wherever you would like.

So please come prepared to participate!

Agenda
1830 - Discussion "AI-Driven Software Development: Strategies, best practices, war stories"
2000 - Networking in our usual spot, Charlotte https://maps.app.goo.gl/LJ6p98tarpwVQktLA

Sponsors
- Our hosts for this event are Deutsche Telekom IT