From eight tracks to three: how Code Europe's program changed in a decade

The Code Europe agenda in 2016 didn’t look like the Code Europe agenda in 2026. That’s not an accident, and it’s not a marketing reinvention either. The shape of the festival has tracked the shape of the work the audience actually does, and over ten years, that work has changed substantially.

This post is about what changed, why, and what it means for the people picking the talks.

2016: broad by design

When Code Europe launched in 2016, we made an editorial choice that ran against the temptation to specialize early. We chose a broad program with many parallel tracks covering frontend, backend, mobile, QA, languages, and what we then filed under “future tech.” Not because we couldn’t focus, but because we believed (and still believe) that software development is fundamentally connected work. The interesting problems live at the seams between disciplines, not inside them. A backend engineer benefits from understanding the constraints the frontend team faces. A senior developer benefits from stepping outside their primary specialization, not from burrowing deeper into it. A conference that drew its boundaries too tightly would have closed off the conversations senior developers actually wanted to have.

That conviction carried Code Europe through nine editions and almost 39,000 cumulative participants across Warsaw, Kraków, and Tricity. The wider catchment wasn’t a compromise. It was the point.

Then AI arrived

In the span of roughly twenty-four months between late 2022 and 2024, the working life of every software engineer changed. The quotation marks around “sudden” feel earned. “AI engineer” went from a non-existent job title to one of the fastest-growing senior roles in the tech market. Teams that had never staffed against generative AI a year earlier were running production LLM systems. Coding assistants moved from novelty to default tool. Engineering work that used to sit in predictable lanes started bleeding into AI-adjacent problems that didn’t have established patterns yet.

The shift isn’t just visible inside the Polish job market. Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, with more than 49,000 responses from 177 countries, found that 84% of developers were using or planning to use AI tools in their work, with 51% of professional developers using them daily. That’s up from 70% adoption in 2023. The day-to-day reality of writing software in 2026 is empirically different from the day-to-day reality of writing software in 2022.

Naming the shift early, Shawn Wang of Latent.Space wrote in mid-2023 that software engineering would “spawn a new subdiscipline, specializing in applications of AI and wielding the emerging stack effectively, just as ‘site reliability engineer’, ‘devops engineer’, ‘data engineer’ and ‘analytics engineer’ emerged,” predicting that AI Engineer “will likely be the highest-demand engineering job of the decade.” Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder and former director of AI at Tesla (now with Anthropic), put it more provocatively the same year: “the hottest new programming language is English.”

Three years later, those framings are no longer contrarian. They describe the shape of the work.

What this doesn’t mean is that AI replaces the engineer. The same 2025 Stack Overflow survey found that 72% of professional developers do not use “vibe coding” (generating entire applications from prompts) as part of their professional work, and 64% do not see AI as a threat to their jobs. Full-stack and backend roles remain the two largest specializations for the sixth year running. The realistic picture is one where senior developers increasingly act as architects, reviewers, and judges of AI-assisted code generation, while new specializations (AI engineering, agent engineering, ML platform engineering) emerge to wield models as a substrate for products. The work changes. The engineer doesn’t disappear.

This wasn’t a gradual shift we could absorb into the existing program shape. It was a step change, and it raised a question we had to answer honestly: was the broad-conference approach still the right service for senior developers when the landscape underneath their feet had shifted this fast?

Two things told us the answer was no.

First, the new disciplines deserved depth, not a slot in a wider catalogue. AI engineering, platform engineering, the architecture work required to run AI workloads in production: each one was an entire conversation, not a track entry. Treating them as line items in a six-track buffet would have meant short-changing the very topics the audience cared most about understanding.

We still believe software development is connected work. The three tracks we landed on for 2026 are explicitly designed to be navigated, not chosen between. But the connections now run through AI as a force in the engineering world, not around it.

2026: three tracks, by design

For 2026, we’ve consolidated the program around three tracks:

• AI Engineering & Data: agents, LLM engineering, RAG, MCP, MLOps, the practical work of getting AI systems into production.
• Cloud, DevOps & Platform Engineering: Kubernetes, internal developer platforms, observability, the discipline of running modern infrastructure at scale.
• Software Architecture & Engineering Excellence: distributed systems, modern languages (Rust, Go, TypeScript, JVM modernization), performance, the staff+ engineer’s playbook.

The reasoning is straightforward. Three tracks is what we can deliver at the depth we want to deliver it. Six tracks would mean a buffet: broader coverage at shallower depth.

Three tracks is also what the technical landscape demanded. Two of the three tracks describe disciplines that didn’t exist as named roles in 2016. “Platform engineer” wasn’t a job title. “AI engineer” (in the sense of someone shipping LLM-powered systems into production) wasn’t either. The shape of engineering work changed; the program had to change with it.

Cybersecurity is the most nuanced case. It’s not absent from Code Europe. It’s embedded across all three tracks where developers and operators actually meet security in their day-to-day. Track 1 takes prompt injection and LLM output validation. Track 2 takes zero trust and CI/CD supply chain. Track 3 takes threat modeling and secure-by-design API patterns. We’ll revisit whether a standalone fourth track makes sense for 2027, once the community ties are in place to deliver it at the depth Code Europe stands for.

Why the agenda committee grew from 4 to around 12

The other big change for 2026: the people choosing the talks.

In earlier editions, the technical curation work was done by a small group of roughly four people doing the heavy lifting on speaker selection, CFP review (more than 450 applications were sent to us for Code Europe 2025!), and track-level coherence. That worked for a wider, shallower program. It doesn’t work for what we’re building now.

For 2026, we’ve expanded the agenda committee to around twelve senior practitioners: engineers, architects, and platform leaders with deep technical credibility in the three tracks. The math is simple. When you’re committing to depth, you need more expert eyes on the CFP, and you need track-level owners who can defend hard “no” decisions on talks that don’t meet the bar. Four people can curate a buffet. Twelve people, properly distributed, can curate three deep tracks with genuine coherence.

A second reason: review volume. As mentioned before, we are expecting to receive a record number of CFPs, and we want to invite as many high-quality speakers as possible. That needs a bigger team to review.

We’ll be introducing the agenda committee in a dedicated post soon — the people, their backgrounds, and how the review process actually works.

What stays the same

The selection bar. No beginner content. No vendor demos disguised as talks. No “future of X” framing without a working system to point at. No talks given at five other conferences this year.

The audience profile. Senior practitioners — the architects, staff+ engineers, and tech leads making the calls. Not students or career-changers.

The voice. Direct, technical, free of hype. The festival that asks speakers to tell you what didn’t work, not just what did.

If you’ve been to Code Europe before, the 2026 program will feel sharper than what you remember. That’s the intention.

Sources

• AI tool adoption among developers: Stack Overflow, 2025 Developer Survey (49,000+ responses, 177 countries); Stack Overflow, 2024 Developer Survey.
• The emergence of AI Engineering as a discipline: Shawn Wang (swyx), The Rise of the AI Engineer, Latent.Space (June 2023).
• “The hottest new programming language is English”: Andrej Karpathy, X (formerly Twitter), January 2023.
• Polish AI/ML labor market: No Fluff Jobs and Just Join IT data (2025), cited via ITCompare.pl and Poland Insight.
• Code Europe attendee data: Code Europe internal data, 2025 edition.