August 2026 Meetup

Code is cheaper than it's ever been, and it will never be this expensive again. Every few decades a technology flips the table on a profession, and software engineering is having that moment right now. The noise around it makes the moment hard to read, and most developers either haven't tried these tools at all or got slop and quit.

I spent the last year learning, building, and refining damn near everything with Claude Code, to unbelievable success. This is what survived contact with the work. The principles that held no matter which model was ahead that week, the tools I run on anything worth doing properly, and an honest accounting of which customizations earned their keep and which ones only ate my evenings. This presentation is for both of those people, plus anyone already using these tools who wants to compare notes.

During this presentation attendees will:

• Learn where AI adoption lands in software engineering's long history of abstraction, and why this shift isn't the one the CASE tools promised
• See a repeatable workflow that produces code they understand, and the guardrails that make an agent's output worth shipping
• Leave knowing why cheap code makes them worth more, not less

Mason is currently a Senior Solutions Architect at Temporal Technologies, where he works with customers to architect and implement durable execution solutions. He specializes in Python, distributed systems, building community, and creating developer-focused educational content. He has held roles in the Developer Relations departments at Temporal, Gretel, and DigitalOcean. Prior to moving to Developer Relations, he held engineering roles at Forcepoint (Raytheon) and Vrbo (Expedia). He's an avid programmer, speaker, educator, and writer/blogger. He is President of the PyTexas Foundation, Conference Chair of the PyTexas Conference, and a founding organizer of the PyTexas Meetup. He was made a PSF Fellow in October 2025.