/dev/world 2026
27-28 AUGUST • NAARM | MELBOURNE
Don't Panic: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Gitting Ship Done
Depending on who you ask, AI coding is either all slop, or the reason you'll never have to read a pull request again. A year of shipping with AI has convinced me both camps are wrong, and honestly, that's a relief. The actual trick is matching the process to the stakes. Vibe coding is genuinely great - for finding out before lunch that your idea was bad. Past that you need better moves: metaprompting, where the AI has to write the brief before it's allowed anywhere near the code; spec handoffs, so your requirements survive first contact with an enthusiastic agent; and for anything that has to face production, workflows like GSD that insist on plans, checkpoints, and commits a human can actually review. None of this is theoretical. I'll show a conference app the robots built in a few days, mostly to prove they could, and a production web product that started out lovingly hand-coded and has since been handed over to the machines one nervous pull request at a time - including the handovers that went badly. Through it all, one skill matters more than anything else: knowing when to stop prompting and go read the code. Don't panic. Bring a towel.
About the presenter
Nic Wittison spent ten years at Canva, helping build its iOS apps before leading engineering for the editor as a Senior Director - a job they jumped ship from the moment GPT-3.5 landed, to work on integrating AI across Canva in the very early days of the latest wave of AI. Since leaving in 2024, they've been back on the tools at a proptech startup, shipping production web code through agentic AI workflows and learning, sometimes the hard way, how to move fast while still having confidence in what actually ships. When not arguing with a language model about whether the build really succeeded, Nic plays video games and issues carefully-worded prompts to two small boys, aged four and two, with a similar success rate.
Interview
We asked Nic a few questions about where Apple's heading and what he's working on.
What are you most excited about in Apple's upcoming OS releases?
The beginnings of their integrated LLM/general purpose AI features.
Is there new hardware you're hoping Apple ships?
Something fun for the Vision Pro.
The rise of AI: excited, scared, intrigued, or something else?
You are absolutely right and you're right to push back. That question is load bearing.
What's the best thing you've built that nobody's heard of?
I built an iPad app that integrated with the Canva internal slack which was our receptionist for 3 years.
What do you wish you'd known when you started building for Apple platforms?
Building dirty and fast to validate ideas before you overcommit time to them will save you from a lot of pain in the long run.
Finish this sentence: "You should come to my talk if..."
...handing over the engineering reins to AI scares you OR if it doesn't scare you enough.
