Don’t Panic! A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Keeping the Human Edge in a Universe of Instant Output

AI launches us into an era of vibe coding and vibe designing. Beside the occasional existential eyebrow raise, we celebrate how much more we can create in so little time. And who doesn’t remember that first moment of generating something in seconds and feeling briefly a bit superhuman? It’s a thrill I once chased when becoming an industrial designer: creating a perfect product in as little time as possible. But during my education, I learned a truth AI now tempts us to forget: joy doesn’t come from the output, but from the journey towards it. Real mastery still lives in the wonderfully human process of exploring, experimenting, and wrestling with complexity. Tacit knowledge – the intuition that guides us through outages, refactors, and legacy integrations – doesn’t materialize when we outsource instant output. But when AI generates code and designs in seconds, in which space can developers still build mental models and slip into that rare flow state?
This talk is a hitchhiker’s guide for everyone using AI to accelerate software development: the eager, the cautious, and the mildly alarmed. But this isn’t a talk about whether AI will or won’t replace developers. It’s about something far stranger and more human: Join a journey that spans developer experience, design thinking and knowledge management to explore how to keep the human edge in a universe of effortless artificial creation.