Self Coding Agents — Colin Flaherty, Augment Code

What if you built an AI coding agent that…built itself? It sounds like science fiction, but AI coding startup Augment Code built an AI agent that not only writes code, but continuously improves its own codebase - including performance optimizations and system architecture. This level of AI autonomy raises fascinating questions about the future of software engineering, where human engineers may shift from writing code to orchestrating multiple self-improving AI agents working in parallel. In this talk, Augment Founding Researcher Colin Faherty will explore: - What does it look like to supervise AI coding agents at scale? - How far can we push AI coding agents - what tasks are out of scope? - What might unlock when AI handles complexity and humans drive innovation? Recorded live at the Leadership Track Session Day from the AI Engineer Summit 2025 in New York. Learn more at https://ai.engineer and purchase tickets to our next event, the AI Engineer World's Fair, in SF June 3 - 5 here: https://ti.to/software-3/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025 About Colin Colin Flaherty is a founding researcher at Augment working on AI agents and retrieval systems. Before that, he was a researcher at Facebook AI Research, where he coauthored a paper in Science on "Cicero"—an AI that mastered the game of Diplomacy, widely considered the next grand challenge in AI for games after Chess, Go, and Poker.