About the Talk:

Join Romain Huet, OpenAI’s Head of Developer Experience, and Aaron Friel, Software Engineer at OpenAI, for a live conversation and demo revealing what it truly looks like to build with AI today—and where the role of software engineers is headed next.

It’s fundamentally about augmentation and acceleration. AI is unlocking new ways of building, creating space for engineers to orchestrate systems, design abstractions, and move from writing every line of code to architecting what’s possible. Romain and Aaron will show how AI-assisted development is pushing the frontier—supercharging creativity, accelerating experimentation, and deepening their own understanding of code.

Aaron, who has been coding since grade school and recently demonstrated his workflow at Dev Day, will walk us through how he uses Codex to tackle multi-step projects, manage complexity, and translate ideas into sophisticated, functioning systems with the right prompts and structure.

Together, they’ll explore how the role of SWE is quickly evolving—not disappearing, but expanding—and how engineers can embrace this shift to unlock new capabilities, new career paths, and an entirely new era of software creation.

See Codex in action. Learn how top builders are adapting. And discover why, in the age of AI, the impact engineers have is bigger than ever.

About the Speakers:

Romain Huet, Head of Developer Experience @ OpenAI

Romain Huet is a French entrepreneur and engineer with a passion for developer platforms. He currently leads Developer Experience at OpenAI, inspiring and supporting founders and builders to integrate AI into their applications, and directing the creation of elegant and powerful tools for all developers. Previously, Romain spent five years at Stripe, leading product management for the developer platform and overseeing global developer relations. Before Stripe, he helped with the relaunch of Twitter’s developer platform and co-founded Jolicloud in Paris, where he developed a cloud-based operating system and the Jolibook, a personal computer.

Aaron Friel, Member of Technical Staff @ OpenAI

Aaron Friel is pushing the frontier of AI adoption and developer productivity on OpenAI's technical staff. A passionate open source contributor, he has contributed to compilers, web frameworks, and cryptography libraries. Friel believes we should make systems work for users, make software development easier, faster, and safer, and apply theory in the service of accessibility. In his free time, he enjoys Dungeons & Dragons and exploring the applications of large language models, sometimes at the same time.