What 30 Sessions Taught Us About AI, Engineering, and the Future of Our Craft

The XP Unconference brought practitioners together to wrestle with the hardest questions in software development — not in keynote-polished form, but in the messy, honest, hands-on way that the XP community does best. While this was the first edition of the conference, many familiar faces from the XP and Socrates/Software Crafter communities attended, and like usual, practitioners wrestled with hard problems. This year, the wrestling partner was unmistakable: AI had taken the mat.

Across two days, roughly 60 participants filled six rooms at a Berlin venue, self-organizing into 30 sessions that covered everything from acceptance test-driven development with AI agents to the ethics of energy consumption, from meditation techniques to whether software engineers need a union. The keynote by Dave Farley — "The Future of Programming with AI: Acceptance Testing as 5GL" — set the tone, but the real substance, as always, came from the sessions.

What follows is a synthesis of insights from all 30 sessions, organized by the themes that cut across them. This is not a session-by-session recap. It is an attempt to capture the collective intelligence of the room — for those who were there and want to remember, and for those who were not and want to learn.

What Did We Learn?

If there is a single through-line across 30 sessions and two days of discussion, it is this: the XP community is not afraid of AI, but it is deeply skeptical of the hype, acutely aware of the risks, and fiercely committed to the human practices that have always made software engineering work.

The conversations revealed a community that is:

• Actively experimenting with every tool available, but with clear eyes about what works and what does not
• Doubling down on fundamentals — TDD, pair programming, example mapping, modular design — not despite AI, but because of it
• Worried about juniors more than about their own jobs, recognizing that the pipeline of future senior engineers is being damaged
• Demanding ethical accountability from both the industry and themselves
• Organizing — concrete discussions about forming collective structures to protect the profession

The XP Unconference brought practitioners together to help each other navigate these challenges. For this first edition, the stakes felt particularly high. But the quality of the conversations — the willingness to share failures, challenge assumptions, and propose concrete next steps — suggests that this community is exactly where it needs to be for the challenges ahead.

See you at the next one.