XP Practices Are the Missing Piece for AI-Assisted Development

AI coding agents are changing how we write software, but what actually makes them work well in practice? Paul shares his experience applying XP practices - TDD, fast feedback, and small steps - alongside AI agents in real projects. The talk includes a demo of a live feature build and covers what's worked, what hasn't, and how to start getting your codebase ready if those foundations aren't in place yet.

Speaker
Paul Hammond is a contract product engineer based in Manchester, UK. He's spent over two decades building software at organisations including the BBC, Sky, Electronic Arts, and Equal Experts, specialising in TypeScript, TDD, and functional programming. He's a long-time advocate of Extreme Programming practices and regularly delivers TDD workshops to development teams. He's currently experimenting with combining XP techniques and AI agents, and maintains an open-source Claude Code framework that encodes these practices into agent workflows (github.com/citypaul/.dotfiles).