Software development education has traditionally involved learning through inquiry and discovery with open experimentation and creativity, over extended periods of time. In today’s goal oriented world, the mode of learning has transitioned to online courses focused on goal oriented, time boxed projects that equip students with the necessary skills for a job.
This also manifests in how the software development process works in a company. Projects are broken down into smaller tasks that are then assigned to individuals who are trained in that task and only focus on completion of that task. While this focus on breakdown into small tasks, distributed across people builds efficiency and determinism into the project, it starves the team of ownership, agency, creativity and learning.
Advances in AI enable us to get the best of both worlds. Today, a single individual software engineer can take on the ownership of an entire project - coming up with the system design, breakdown into modular components, coding for each of the components, writing tests and fixing bugs if any. Multiple approaches, software components, design patterns, testing practices can be tried out quickly with open experimentation to identify the optimal one for the end outcome. This is possible with AI, more specifically, Large Language Models (LLMs) optimized for code generation and agentic workflows that allow for information retrieval, synthesis, code generation, agentic task breakdown and actions. Use of AI like this needs changes to the way people learn coding, and the way the software development process is executed.
This workshop aims to equip participants with knowledge to use the latest in AI tools, taking their software development productivity and quality to the next level. With a unique learning model of applying conceptual understanding, system design, rapid research and AI code generation with agentic workflows, participants will be able to adapt to the new learning cycle and the new software development process with AI. As opposed to just prescribing tools for tasks, this workshop will coach participants on ‘learning how to learn’ in a hands-on way so that they are able to find, use and enhance the latest tools as and when they evolve. We hope this workshop acts as a catalyst for participants to build next generation products navigating the new world of software development with AI.
Since this workshop is focused on using AI tools and techniques across the software development cycle, it is applicable to a wide spectrum of participants.
For beginners - AI for setting up Git, docker and getting a simple application with frontend, backend and API built will help you get started on your projects.
For students (from any domain) - AI for getting basic programs going, quickly finding and summarizing research papers, understanding how a particular code was written will help you get productive with your domain specific tasks.
For recent graduates - no longer think of yourself only as frontend or backend or data engineers, with AI you can be all.
For professionals - learn how to up the quality bar with AI tools with code reviews, design pattern suggestions, finding the right open source library, automated testing amongst many other techniques.
For educators - discover how you can not ban but embrace AI in your classrooms and take teaching and learning to another orbit with AI.