Kate Holterhoff!

RedMonk

Bio!
Kate Holterhoff, an industry analyst with RedMonk, has a background in frontend engineering, academic research, and technical communication. Kate comes to RedMonk from the digital marketing sector and brings with her expertise in frontend engineering, QA, accessibility, and scrum best practices. Before pursuing a career in the tech industry Kate taught writing and communication courses at several East Coast universities. She earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon in 2016 and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship (2016-2018) at Georgia Tech, where she is currently an affiliated researcher.
Session!

The Vibe Analyst's Guide to AI Coding: From Autocomplete to Agent Orchestration


Whether you're experimenting with AI coding assistants or managing teams that use them, understanding "vibe coding" is essential to navigating software development in 2026. This talk decodes the shift from autocomplete to autonomous agents, examining how developers went from tab completion to directing parallel AI workers overnight. You'll gain a clear framework for the 10 key capabilities developers now demand—from background agents and persistent memory to multi-agent orchestration and rollback systems—along with practical insights into which tools deliver and which fall short based on real practitioner feedback. Beyond the hype, you'll learn to navigate the defining tension shaping the market: the battle between human-in-loop control (audit trails, permissions, safety) and vibe coding's "trust the output, not the process" philosophy. Through examples like Ralph Wiggum's contextual pressure cooker, Gas Town's agent orchestration, and emerging patterns in spec-driven development, you'll understand where the ecosystem is headed and how to make informed decisions about adopting, managing, or building AI-assisted development tools. Whether you're a hands-on developer, engineering leader, or product strategist, you'll leave with a pragmatic understanding of what actually matters in this rapidly evolving space—and what's just noise.
Where/When?

Time:
10:30 AM

Room:
The Last Starfighter - Theatre 14 (12,13)