Malleable Software: When Everyone Can Build, What Makes a Great Product? Dave Killeen

What makes a great product when anyone can build one? With the cost of AI collapsing to near-zero, a single person can now ship 17,000 lines of code overnight, reverse-engineer entire products from public documentation, and stand up working software over a weekend. In this keynote, Dave Killeen argues that the comforting line we've all been telling ourselves — that "AI writes the code, but humans bring the taste" — has quietly stopped being true. The job has shifted. We're no longer Michelin chefs designing menus from a quiet kitchen; we're truffle hunters, pattern-matching at scale across the entire ecosystem to spot what's worth building before anyone else does. 

Drawing on his own work building Dex (an open-source AI operating system that ended up on Apple's radar) and Sangeet Paul Choudary's argument that AI is the shipping container of knowledge work, Dave shows why coordination — not productivity — is the real bottleneck, what malleable software actually looks like in practice, and where the genuine moat sits when everyone has the same superpowers. Expect live demos, a few uncomfortable truths about where this is all heading, and three practical gifts to walk out with: an open-source toolkit, an AI career ladder generator for your team, and a prompt that turns half-baked ideas into something worth shipping.