AustinPHP @ ESC13 // Before the First Prompt
About the event
We're beaming in a remote MergePHP presenter into ESC13 again this month, with David Stanley following up on Matt Trask's presentation last month. Show up in-person or tune in online.
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Last month Matt showed us what eight months of heavy Claude adoption looks like at Gymdesk: the MCP server, the specs, the triage packets, the bots, and the 2,385 pull requests. He also showed us the part nobody warns you about: the silos, the lost stopping points, and a team that can be overwhelmed by its own output.
There is no shortage of content on what AI coding agents can do. Almost all of it is filmed on a toy project or a clean greenfield codebase with no technical debt. There is very little on how to think about agents before you type your first prompt into a legacy, brownfield application, and even less on how to keep a team sane once they work. We will cover the mental models that hold up (an agent is not autocomplete, not a junior engineer, and not a search engine), what an agent needs from a codebase and why it is the same list your team always needed, the small set of habits that separate a good first week from a frustrating one, and the progression from one engineer experimenting to a team shipping with guardrails. Then we will answer Matt's closing questions from the engineering leadership side: which gates we put in place, what we measure, and how to say "not faster" when the numbers make everyone want to go faster.
You will leave with a starting point, not a feature list.
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David is the VP of Engineering at Gymdesk, where he leads the fully remote team of engineers and QA folks that Matt's September talk came out of. A PHP developer for most of his career, he now spends his days on the parts of AI adoption that happen after the demo: compliance, infrastructure, modernizing a Zend Framework 1 monolith, and keeping a small team steady while the tooling changes under it. He lives in Kansas City. You can find him on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidstanley01/).
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