Crafting the Code You Don’t Write: Sculpting Software in an AI World – Daisy Hollman – CppCon 2025

It’s shockingly uncontroversial to say that the fields of developer experience and developer productivity have changed more in the past six months than in the 25 years before that.

As part of the Claude Code team at Anthropic, Daisy has had the privilege of witnessing the evolution of agentic coding from proof-of-concept experiments to nearly autonomous software engineers in just six months. In this keynote, Daisy shares some experiences and learnings from that journey, talks about how LLMs work more generally, attempts some live demonstrations of the latest functionality, explores the future of agentic programming, and tie all of this back to what it means for a software engineers workflow.

“When I agreed to give this talk earlier this year, there was some portion of the narrative that involved “why you should be using agents to accelerate your development process.” Since then, the world of software engineering has evolved such that the interesting question is no longer “why” but “how.” Like sculptors facing the invention of power tools, or painters around the invention of photography, we now live in a world where vast quantities of rough-draft code can be generated with a very low barrier to entry. How does the role of a software engineer evolve when AI can autonomously implement features from requirements? How do we build safety features into the power tools we’re chiseling away at our codebases with? What aspects of software craftsmanship become more important, not less, in an age of abundant code generation? And critically for the C++ community: how do we leverage these tools where correctness and performance are non-negotiable? The future isn’t about AI replacing programmers, but about a fundamental shift in how we think about software creation. And surprisingly, you might not miss the old way of doing things.”