Talks
The Software Composer’s Journey: Building Web Applications with AI and Human Collaboration
Speaker: Jake Levirne, CEO & Co-founder, SpecStory
The emergence of AI coding assistants has given rise to a new type of developer: the Software Composer. These innovators create applications through AI-assisted workflows, working at higher levels of abstraction than traditional coding. In this talk, I’ll demonstrate live how a Software Composer builds a web application from scratch using AI tools, highlighting both the magical possibilities and practical limitations of this approach. Drawing from our experiences at SpecStory, I’ll share insights on how traditional software engineers and Software Composers can effectively collaborate, including the challenges we’ve encountered and solutions we’ve developed. I’ll introduce how capturing and sharing AI coding session histories can bridge the gap between these different workflows, enabling more robust collaboration in this new paradigm of software development.
Streamlining Enterprise-Software Development with High-Level Components and an LLM Cherry on Top
Speaker: Adam Chlipala, Chief Scientist & Co-founder, Nectry
The zeitgeist has shifted toward trying to solve all problems by training opaque DNN models on large data sets, but is that the right approach for all of the high-profile problem areas? I’ll argue that it’s an especially bad fit for software-development tools, as they inhabit an artificial world that we have the ability to design for legibility to both humans and algorithms. As a result, we can both accelerate automation to find good programs and benefit from principled assurance that the programs we arrive at are high-quality. I’ll demo Nectry, our startup’s product whose heart is novel technology in programming languages and compilers, centered on a new component architecture for enterprise software. These components adapt automatically to details of an application’s data schema. Choosing the right components and how to configure them is probably too complex for potential users without programming background, but we built an LLM-powered front end to make application development feel like chatting with a human developer. The AI just chooses from our curated component library, representing a much simpler search space than when we ask for thousands of lines of Python.
Jake is a passionate builder whether starting from a blank whiteboard or early-stage prototype and transforming it into something people truly value. So it is no surprise that he built SpecStory, which integrates with AI coding tools to let coders save and share their composer and chat history. He has led teams at companies both large and small, including Docker, DigitalOcean, Yesware, and IBM. Jake holds a B.S. in computer science from Cornell.
Adam is co-founder of Nectry, which aspires to democratize high-quality application generation by being the AI chatbot that replaces a human software engineering consultant who builds the features you ask for, with no need to read or write code. The Nectry platform was born from his research as a MIT professor of computer science that focuses on streamlining complex, repetitive tasks in enterprise software. Adam holds a BS in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
