Building ambitious software — Jonathan Kelley, Dioxus Labs & Cognition
Jonathan Kelley discusses building ambitious, cross-platform software using Rust (Dioxus), detailing the challenges of maintaining high quality across a complex stack. He highlights how AI coding agents have dramatically accelerated development—allowing the team to implement features like deeply integrated Kotlin and Swift plugins in weeks—but notes that this shift changes the focus from writing code to maintaining architectural quality. The core message is that while code is now cheap, architectural integrity and quality remain the primary concerns for ambitious projects.
Key takeaways
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The Shift in Software Engineering Focus
17:12
With AI agents handling the low-level development burden (e.g., fighting the borrow checker), the job of a software engineer shifts from writing code to architecting elegant solutions and thinking about system evolution.
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Code Quality vs. Code Quantity
17:12
The speaker asserts that 'code is cheap now, but quality is not.' Maintaining a high quality bar across the entire codebase is critical for developer experience and business stability.
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AI Agents as Knowledge Accelerators
13:20
Coding agents excel at 'knowledge problems,' such as sifting through thousands of pages of documentation, reverse engineering APIs, and recalling deep technical specifications (e.g., CSS specs), accelerating tasks that previously took years of hand-written effort.