What handcrafted servers taught us about handcrafted code

Whether AI-generated code should be treated as disposable, what the shift to immutable infrastructure taught us, and how those lessons apply to the way teams write and maintain code today.

Speakers: Charity Majors

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September 29, 2026

New York • September 8 & 9, 2027

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The cost of software has always been about the cost of its maintenance.

Until recently, code was so time-consuming and difficult to produce and maintain that all our research was focused on making code easier to understand, and all our practices and rituals were centered around a slow, steady drip of small changes to a baseline assumed to be good–the durable code model.

That model has been upended in the past few months, since AI can now generate code approximately as good as that of the median software engineer.

Does this mean all software can and should be replaced by disposable code? What lessons should we take from the immutable infrastructure revolution of the last decade, and how should they guide us today?

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