The waterfall debate isn’t dead. It just changed shape. When AI entered software engineering, it brought with it the oldest metaphor in the industry: the factory. Developers prompt. AI produces. Code ships. Faster, cheaper, more. The conveyor belt is back, and this time it’s powered by something that sounds like it understands you.
But the factory metaphor was wrong in 1970, and it is wrong now. Software engineering was never manufacturing. It was never an assembly line. Peter Naur told us in 1985 that programming is theory building. A fundamentally cognitive, creative, collaborative act. The code was never the whole value. The understanding was.
This keynote takes a deliberately contentious proposition and uses it to crack open the metaphors that still govern how teams think about software, collaboration, and intelligence. Drawing from the AI Literacy for Software Engineers framework, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and 500 years of technology panics, you’ll take away practical tools to see your own metaphors, challenge them, and begin designing collaboration spaces where human and artificial intelligence actually thrive together.
You will leave with a new way to see your relationship with AI tools. Not as a faster you. Not as a threat. As a fundamentally different kind of intelligence that requires a fundamentally different kind of collaboration space: From factory-thinking to habitat thinking.
Platforms Were Always the (Sword) Point
