/dev/world 2026

Don't Panic: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Gitting Ship Done

Depending on who you ask, AI coding is either all slop, or the reason you'll never have to read a pull request again. A year of shipping with AI has convinced me both camps are wrong, and honestly, that's a relief. The actual trick is matching the process to the stakes. Vibe coding is genuinely great - for finding out before lunch that your idea was bad. Past that you need better moves: metaprompting, where the AI has to write the brief before it's allowed anywhere near the code; spec handoffs, so your requirements survive first contact with an enthusiastic agent; and for anything that has to face production, workflows like GSD that insist on plans, checkpoints, and commits a human can actually review. None of this is theoretical. I'll show a conference app the robots built in a few days, mostly to prove they could, and a production web product that started out lovingly hand-coded and has since been handed over to the machines one nervous pull request at a time - including the handovers that went badly. Through it all, one skill matters more than anything else: knowing when to stop prompting and go read the code. Don't panic. Bring a towel.

About the presenter

Nic Wittison spent ten years at Canva, helping build its iOS apps before leading engineering for the editor as a Senior Director - a job they jumped ship from the moment GPT-3.5 landed, to work on integrating AI across Canva in the very early days of the latest wave of AI. Since leaving in 2024, they've been back on the tools at a proptech startup, shipping production web code through agentic AI workflows and learning, sometimes the hard way, how to move fast while still having confidence in what actually ships. When not arguing with a language model about whether the build really succeeded, Nic plays video games and issues carefully-worded prompts to two small boys, aged four and two, with a similar success rate.