Presentation

The Children Yearn for the Mines

Finding Craftsmanship in AI-Assisted Software Engineering

Segun Akinyemi | Senior Software Engineer | Microsoft

Segun Akinyemi

Senior Software Engineer

GitHub

Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft building systems that power business decisions using Azure. I lead STEM outreach initiatives in Charlotte, North Carolina, connecting people with knowledge that helps them navigate tech careers. Beyond that, I blog, read, run, hike, watch anime, longboard, and enjoy exploring Charlotte's best third places.

•🌍 Roots: Nigerian heritage, raised in Seattle, educated in St. Louis, now in Charlotte.

•🎓 Education: B.S. in Computer Information Systems (Lindenwood University), M.S. in Information Systems Management (Washington University in St. Louis).

•💻 Engineer: Building with Python, C#, TypeScript, & SQL. Embracing AI Engineering.

•📚 STEM Educator: Leading programs that connect students with tech careers.

Website

> About

> Highlights

Let me explain the title of this talk. What is the best-selling video game of all time?

Before you judge me, know that there’s nothing literal about “The Children Yearn for the Mines”. It’s a meme.

Before we dive in…

Know Your Meme History
The Children Yearn for the Mines

Agenda

•Coding Has Been "Dying" Since 1959

•Builders vs. Artisans

•Thinking Hard Isn't Dead

•The New Mine

•How Engineers Stay in Control

Coding Has Been "Dying" Since 1959

Every decade has tried to replace developers, but the job just won't go away

A New World for Developers
By Magnetic Empty Cup

Prompt Engineering Is Dead
By Ian Gotts

Coding “Dies”, Software Grows
By Kedasha Kerr

Why We’ve Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade

Stephan Schwab traces fifty years of tools that promised to let business users build software without developers, from COBOL in the 1960s and flowchart generators in the 1980s to Visual Basic, low-code platforms, and now AI.

Every wave made it easier to get started, and every wave ended up creating more demand for developers instead of replacing them.

The challenge is that software development isn’t primarily constrained by typing speed or syntax knowledge. It’s constrained by the thinking required to handle complexity well.

A Very Comprehensive
and Precise Spec

What year was this webcomic first published?

August 25th, 2016

6 years before the November 2022 release of ChatGPT!

It was aimed at the rising Low Code/No Code revolution.

We’ve been here before!

The Future of Software Is No Code
Hacker News (2018)

Does anyone know the name of the company behind this logo?

Do you think it was already dying? Do you miss it? Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

Some Quick Trivia

Builders vs. Artisans

Why some engineers are having the time of their lives while others feel a real loss

Who invented the term vibe coding?

And if we can’t get the name, what kind of person, in terms of job title and background, do you think it is?

A quick question…

The Creation of Vibe Coding
Twitter (February 2025)

Vibe Engineering
Hacker News (2025)

Building vs Coding
Twitter (2025)

Has AI Killed Our Joy?
Hacker News (2025)

AI For Sure Killed My Joy
Hacker News (2025)

Claude Code Killed My Passion
Hacker News (2026)

Just A Markdown Manager
Twitter (2026)

Struggling to Find Connection
Twitter (2026)

What is the best pastry?

I promise this connects to learning just bear with me.

A Quick Question

Forest Trail House
Mint Hill, NC

The Dripolator
Black Mountain, NC

Emotional Intelligence Is Underrated

There is no definitive answer to what the best pastry is. The same is true for loving building or loving coding.

That’s a mature perspective.
An emotionally intelligent one.

Be empathetic to those feeling the loss of artisan coding. And understanding of those having fun.

Thinking Hard Isn't Dead

Why using coding agents doesn't mean turning off your brain

I Miss Thinking Hard
By Juan Ernesto

Audio Noise AI Commit
By Linus Torvalds

Linux Kernel Mailing List
By Linus Torvalds

The New Mine

Where the engineering work is now that code is generated

Nothing Has Changed About Software Engineering

Ben Eggers, a Software Engineer at OpenAI, argues that all the hard parts of building software are still here and still hard. AI Agents move that work, but they do not make it disappear.

The job of a Software Engineer now is to deliver code they have proven to be correct. That still requires technical humans in the loop to define intent, design systems and APIs, structure codebases, build tests and CI/CD, secure infrastructure, and review what AI produces.

AI Engineering

The discipline of building reliable software on top of AI models.

Unpredictable outputs are the defining challenge

Model Tradeoffs

Context & Tools

Evals & Guardrails

Production

Most AI Engineers still have Software Engineer as their job title.

Agentic Engineering

The discipline of developing software with the assistance of AI agents that can both write and execute code.

Code execution is the defining capability

Write Code

Run It

Inspect Evidence

Iterate

The engineer still owns design, evidence, review, and outcome.

Who invented the term Agentic Engineering?

And if we can’t get the name, can you guess the background, in terms of career field, of the person?

A quick question…

The Invention of Agentic Engineering
Twitter (2026)

Everything Engineering

Prompt Engineering

Tell it what to do

Instructions, examples, rules

Context Engineering

Give it what it needs

Files, data, history, access

Harness Engineering

Control how it works

Tools, tests, permissions

Loop Engineering

Help it work continuously

Feedback, memory, stop rules

Graph Engineering

Map the paths it can take

Branches, retries, approvals

Human Beings Set goals and standards. Choose what AI can access and do. Remain accountable.

The Building Blocks of Context Engineering

From “make no mistakes” to all this just to get good results from AI Agents

Custom Instructions

Always-on rules

Agent Skills

On-demand know-how

MCP Servers

External tools & data

Custom Agents

Specialized role & tools

Agent Does Stuff

Reads, edits, calls tools

Agent Hooks

Deterministic checks on events

Verified Result

Agent Plugins

Package and share all five as one installable unit

Context Is the New Code

OpenAI

The New Code

Anthropic

Effective Context Engineering

GitHub

Try Context Engineering

Microsoft

Set Up a Context Engineering Flow

Tessl

Context Is the New Code

Thoughtworks

Context Engineering: Coding Agents

Philipp Schmid

The New Skill Is Context Engineering

Drew Breunig

How to Fix Your Context

How Engineers Stay in Control

Real examples of maintaining craftsmanship when AI writes the code

Have the Agent Grill Your Plan

Make the agent interview you on edge cases and design before it writes any code.

Grilling Agent Skill
By Matt Pocock

Grill Me Command
By Google Antigravity

Ask for Plain English

Tell the agent to explain things super simply so you can easily understand it.

Simplified Technical English
By Andrej Karpathy

Wait What Agent Skill
By Matt Pocock

Ask for Visual Explanations

Have the agent generate interactive web pages, diagrams, or walkthroughs to help you understand what it did.

Website Walkthroughs
By Geoffrey Litt

Interactive Explanations
By Simon Willison

Video Walkthroughs
By Andrej Karpathy

Math Animate Agent Skill
By Yusuke710 (3Blue1Brown Inspired)

Have Agents Challenge the Code

Have separate agents with their own context windows question the design, call out over-engineering, and find bugs.

Doubt Driven Development
By Addy Osmani

Adversarial Code Review
By Jarred Sumner of Bun

Test Context Like Code

Version control your instructions, skills, custom agents, etc. and run automated checks on them just like source code.

Awesome Copilot
By the GitHub Community

Testing Context Like Code
By PostHog

Build Custom Tools for Coding by Hand

If you still love writing code yourself, use agents to build custom debuggers and tools that support your craft.

AI Tools, Human Coding, More Fun
By Geoffrey Litt

Wrapping Things Up

Some inspiration on your way out for staying knee deep in the mines

Agentic Engineering Patterns
By Simon Willison

”

Laurie Voss | AI Writes the Code. So, What’s Left for Engineers?

The craft of programming will survive in the same way that woodworking survived the furniture factory.

Programmers program the way that singers sing, in an empty room with nobody watching just because they love it, and that won't go away.

You can still do that. It just won't be the thing that people pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to do.

”

Simon Willison | Your Job Is to Deliver Code You Have Proven to Work

Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.

As software engineers we don’t just crank out code, in fact these days you could argue that’s what the LLMs are for. We need to deliver code that works, and we need to include proof that it works...

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming As We Know It

A fantastic article by the New York Times that speaks with software engineers, from the frontier firms, to big tech, to startups, about how AI coding has impacted their work and love for the field.

It does an excellent job at capturing the wide range of emotions across the tech community. Some hate AI coding and think it means we’re all screwed. Others feel the opposite, they’ve never felt freer, and remain confident that humans are still needed.

What Is AI Engineering?

Coding Is Dead (SWE Isn’t)

My LinkedIn

Check out my blog at segunak.com

Follow Up Resources

Thank You!

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Questions?