Abstract
You're mass-adopting tools you don't fully trust. You're shipping faster but your delivery stability is dropping. Your juniors are getting harder to hire and the ones you do hire are measurably worse at debugging. Meanwhile, someone just rebuilt your framework of choice in a week using AI and $1,100 worth of API tokens.
This panel is for frontend and mobile engineers trying to make sense of what's actually happening versus what's hype. Practitioners from platform infrastructure, observability, serverless architecture, digital consultancy, and mobile development will share what they're seeing on the ground and debate what it means. You'll leave with:
- A reality check from people building and shipping right now - what's actually changing in production error patterns, deployment data, and client expectations, and what's just noise?
- An honest conversation about your expertise - what happens to the value of your skills when AI can scaffold a production app, how debugging and architectural judgement change when you're reviewing code you didn't write, and whether the "coder to orchestrator" transition is genuinely accessible or just a comforting narrative
- Practical perspectives on where to invest your time - which skills the panellists see becoming more valuable, what "architecture as a moat" looks like in their work, and whether you should be building for AI agents as well as humans
The claims above are grounded in recent research: Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey (84% AI adoption, 3% high trust), DORA 2024 (delivery stability declines with AI adoption), Anthropic's coding skills study (AI-assisted developers score lower on debugging), and Cloudflare's viNext (Next.js API surface rebuilt in under a week).
Speaker
Luca Mezzalira
Principal Serverless Specialist Solutions Architect @AWS, Author of “Building Micro-Frontends”, International Speaker
Luca Mezzalira is principal solutions architect at AWS, an international speaker, and an author. Over the past 20 years, he’s mastered software architectures from frontend to the cloud, providing the right solution for the context of the job at hand.
Find Luca Mezzalira at:
Speaker
James Hall
Founder and Director @Parallax, Author of jsPDF
James Hall is Tech Director and Founder at Parallax, where he leads on AI and software consulting.
Parallax created a mobile web browser for a startup that used LLMs before the launch of ChatGPT and has since produced many production AI systems for large enterprises and startups alike.
James is also the creator of jsPDF, one of the more widely used open-source JavaScript libraries, with 40 million monthly downloads.
Speaker
Danielle An
Principal Engineer / GenAI Architect @Meta, Ph.D. with 15 years of professional experience in film, MR and gaming
Danielle is a Principal Engineer at Meta Horizon, where she spearheads Generative AI initiatives designed to redefine immersive world-building. A veteran of the film industry with a pedigree including Pixar and DreamWorks, Danielle has spent her career at the high-stakes intersection of artistry and technical innovation. From architecting the Instagram AR platform to scaling Meta Avatars, she has a proven track record of shipping products that resonate with billions of users globally.
Speaker
Ivan Zarea
Director of Platform Engineering @Netlify
Ivan is Director of Platform Engineering at Netlify, where he leads the teams responsible for builds, compute, and the CDN that serves millions of sites. He's spent the past decade leading platform teams, and currently focuses on cost, reliability, agent experience, and developer tooling.
Find Ivan Zarea at:
Date
Wednesday Mar 18 / 01:35PM GMT ( 50 minutes )
Location
Windsor (5th Fl.)
Slides
Slides are not available
