A hands-on workshop covering the full lifecycle of AI-assisted development, from turning ambiguous requirements into agent-ready plans to running autonomous coding agents that ship production features. You'll learn to stress-test vague briefs into structured PRDs, slice work into thin "tracer bullet" vertical slices, and run an AI agent with TDD. You'll watch it select tasks, write tests, implement code, and commit. You'll then refine your prompts based on where it struggles, graduate to fully autonomous (AFK) runs, and learn to design codebases that maximize agent effectiveness. You'll walk away knowing how to: - Turn ambiguous requirements into agent-ready issues - Slice work into vertical tracer bullets an agent can grab independently - Run AI agents human-in-the-loop and autonomously with TDD - Design codebase architectures that AI agents love to work in For: Engineers ready to move beyond chat-based AI assistance and build a real workflow for shipping features with autonomous coding agents. Speaker info: - - - @mattpocockuk Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:00:14 - The Thesis of AI Engineering 00:04:20 - Phase 1: Research & Prototyping 00:12:45 - Phase 2: The Grill Session 00:22:10 - Phase 3: Writing the PRD 00:35:50 - Phase 4: Slicing Work into Issues 00:48:15 - Phase 5: Implementation with AI Agents 01:05:30 - Phase 6: Human-in-the-Loop Review 01:18:45 - Phase 7: Deployment & Monitoring 01:28:10 - Designing Codebases for AI Effectiveness 01:34:06 - Final Takeaways & Summary --- Join AI Engineer CODE in San Francisco, November 10–12: our last flagship conference of 2026. This selective, application-only gathering brings together top agentic engineers to explore software factories, system-one models and large-scale rewrites. Explore this talk's slides, transcript, key takeaways and resources on its official AI Engineer page: ---