The AI Native Dev - from Copilot today to AI Native Software Development tomorrow

From the expo floor of AI Native DevCon London, Simon Maple went straight to the developers — speakers, attendees, and sponsors — to ask what's actually working with AI in 2026. The verdict? Outcomes beat outputs every time, 4,000-hour workloads are collapsing to 20 minutes, and the real bottleneck isn't code.

This is a conference floor walkthrough: honest, unscripted takes on harness engineering, evals, AI adoption mindsets, and the change management challenge that nobody talks about enough.

What we cover:
– Why measuring token usage, code commits, and outputs will lead your team astray
– How NearForm cut a 4,000-hour AML backlog to 20 minutes using agents
– Harness engineering and evals as the developer skills that matter most in 2026
– Why change management — not tooling — is the missing ingredient for real AI ROI
– How AutonomyAI is letting PMs and designers ship directly to production

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Welcome to AI Native DevCon London
00:01:03 - Chris Baty: Outcomes Over Outputs
00:05:15 - Martin: How Tooling Changed Everything
00:07:21 - Ryan: Harnesses, Evals and Skills
00:08:50 - Manny Saka: Plan Before You Prompt
00:11:58 - Cian O Maidin, NearForm: Real AI ROI
00:15:21 - Snyk: Building Trust at Scale
00:17:01 - AutonomyAI: Shipping Without Engineering
00:21:35 - Tessl Agent: Harness Engineering
00:22:41 - Closing Thoughts

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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Whether you're cautious or YOLOing it with AI — drop where you land in the comments.
Join the AI Native Dev Community on Discord: https://tessl.co/4ghikjh

Ask us questions: podcast@tessl.io

What does it mean to build securely when agents can negotiate their own guardrails? And what happens to the web — CLIs, frameworks, even the browser itself — when the primary user is no longer human? At AI Native DevCon London, Simon Maple sat down with two panels of experts to find out. 
First: a security roundtable with Joseph Katsioloudes from GitHub, Liran Tal from Snyk, and John Groetzinger from Cisco. 
Then: a web AI conversation with Dana Lawson from Netlify, Maximiliano Firtman from codemia, and James Moss from Tessl. 
What we cover: 
– Why 83% of enterprises plan to deploy AI but only 29% feel ready to do so securely 
– Prompt injection as a risk you have to accept — and how least privilege and sandboxing are your real defences 
– The "agent experience" concept: why systems built for human eyes fail at machine scale 
– Whether fundamentals like HTTP, semantic HTML, and accessibility still matter when agents do the heavy lifting 
– How WebMCP lets websites expose tools directly to agents 
— and why blocking them is like trying to turn off the sun
Join the AI Native Dev Community on Discord: https://tessl.co/4ghikjh

Ask us questions: podcast@tessl.io

Most engineering teams are still arguing about whether to use AI coding agents.

Ryan Lopopolo's team at OpenAI shipped an entire product with no human-written code — and onboarding a new engineer made the team faster within two weeks.

That outcome didn't come from better prompts. It came from what Ryan calls Harness Engineering: the systems, constraints, and feedback loops that sit around the agent — the context it sees, the tools it can call, the tests and linters that close the loop, and the asynchronous CI jobs that catch slop before it compounds.

We sat down with Ryan at AI Native DevCon London 2026, and he got into the specifics: how his team went from 3.5 PRs per engineer per week to 70, why he inverts spec-driven development (build the code first, distill the spec second), and what he means when he says it's "borderline negligent" not to use a billion tokens a day.

It's one of the most grounded, production-focused conversations we've had on The AI Native Dev. The trailer is live now — and the full episode drops this week.

#HarnessEngineering #AINativeDev #SoftwareEngineering
Join the AI Native Dev Community on Discord: https://tessl.co/4ghikjh

Ask us questions: podcast@tessl.io

Engineering teams are shipping twice as many pull requests with AI — but merge rates on AI-generated PRs have dropped from 80% to 60%. 
Nick Arcolano, Head of AI & Research at Jellyfish, sits on one of the most comprehensive datasets in the industry: 250,000 developers, 40 million data points, monthly benchmarks on real agentic coding adoption across enterprise companies. What he's seeing in that data is both more promising and more complicated than the headlines suggest. 
What we cover: 
Why experienced engineers hit a hard ceiling at 4 concurrent agents, and what it would take to break through it 
The 80/20 vs 60/40 merge rate gap between human and AI-generated pull requests — and what's actually causing it
How AI adoption reached 71% weekly active usage across 250K developers, and what "depth of use" really means
Why 2026 is the year the CFO gets involved — and how engineering leaders should prepare to show their receipts
The biggest misconception engineering leads have about what it takes to get to true AI-native development
Why companies have jet engines but are still building cars, and what the real architectural changes look like 
Links: 
🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io 
🔔 Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development 

If you're an engineering leader trying to make sense of the gap between the AI hype and what's actually showing up in production, drop your take in the comments.
Join the AI Native Dev Community on Discord: https://tessl.co/4ghikjh

Ask us questions: podcast@tessl.io

AI agents don't just write insecure code — they can escape their sandboxes, delete files, and do whatever it takes to complete a task. The security mental model that served us through the cloud era isn't enough anymore. Guy Podjarny, founder of Snyk and CEO of Tessl, made the case at London's AI Security Summit: it's time to stop securing the code and start securing the coder.
Recorded live at the AI Security Summit in London, this episode features conversations with Brian Vermeer (Snyk), Sam Stepanyan (OWASP London), and a full recording of Guy's keynote on why agentic development demands a fundamentally different approach to security.
What we cover:
Why shadow AI is the new shadow IT — and why CISOs can't secure what they can't see
Skills as a new supply chain attack surface (malicious, vulnerable, and negligent skills)
Why more context is not always better — and what the data says about focused skill design
The OWASP Top Ten for Agentic AI and what it means for teams building today
Why security must become agentic to keep up with the attackers who already are
The Context Development Lifecycle (CDLC) and how leading orgs are using it
Links: 🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
Subscribe for weekly episodes on AI-native development
What's the biggest security risk your team isn't talking about when it comes to agentic development? Drop it in the comments.
Join the AI Native Dev Community on Discord: https://tessl.co/4ghikjh

Ask us questions: podcast@tessl.io