How can developers use AI well without quietly losing the core skills the job still depends on? Bethany Janos, a senior software engineer at GitHub working on the backend systems behind Copilot chat and agents, takes that question seriously from inside the tooling. The talk covers the history of AI in software development, explains what harnesses are and why they matter more than most developers realize, and works through the current tool vocabulary: MCPs, plugins, skills, and tokenmaxxing. Crucially it also covers the other half, when AI genuinely helps and when the right move is to set it aside and write the thing yourself. Hosted online by The Tech Academy, with time set aside for audience questions at the end. Useful for working engineers and for people early in a development career trying to figure out which habits to build.
