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Michael Feathers

Michael Feathers

Founder

R7K Research & Conveyance

AT A GLANCE

Role

Founder

Organisation

R7K Research & Conveyance

Category

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ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Michael Feathers is the founder of Research & Conveyance, where he focuses on software and organizational design. He has advised hundreds of organizations on software architecture, design, process change, and the evolution of long-lived systems. Michael is the author of the influential book Working Effectively with Legacy Code and a frequent speaker at international software conferences.

TALK

Re-Skilling Rather Than De-Skilling

If the machine can build the system, why should we still learn how? A year or two ago that question was about assistants that finished our functions. Now agents take a ticket, work for hours, and come back with a pull request. Many of us spend more time reviewing and steering than writing. The fear that we’re losing our craft has moved from speculation to daily experience.

The symptoms of what Dave Laribee calls learning debt are easier to see now. We approve diffs we couldn’t have written. We can’t explain a design without asking the agent that produced it. We regenerate instead of understand, and we feel uneasy when the tools are down. Teams are also asking a harder question: if juniors never struggle through the basics, where will the next seniors come from?

De-skilling isn’t inevitable. Skill is a physical process. It grows under load, through effort, struggle, and being wrong, and it fades when it isn’t used. A tool that removes all the friction also removes the signal that tells us to adapt. When the work happens out of sight, that signal can vanish entirely.

In this keynote, Michael Feathers looks at what we should keep, what we can let go of, and what we now need to build on purpose. Some skills become more valuable when generation is cheap: judging work we didn’t write, holding a system’s shape in our heads, and knowing when an agent is confidently wrong. A few of them aren’t the ones you’d expect. He also shares a handful of simple, straightforward practices that teams can start using immediately, so we grow sharper alongside our agents rather than duller behind them.

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Speakers, program drops and much more of the community.

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© 2026 code.talks · alphalist GmbH · Hamburg

Let’s connect on LinkedIn.

Speakers, program drops and much more of the community.

A 2-day sweet spot conference for the entire dev team to stay future-proof in the age of AI.

© 2026 code.talks · alphalist GmbH · Hamburg