AI Native Engineering
What Horizon's AI for Productivity programme tried, what worked, and what we discounted, at least for now.
Tessl’s AI Native DevCon brought two days of talks on AI-assisted development to The Brewery in London, and I joined on the Context Window stage to talk about AI4P (AI for Productivity) - the programme we created inside Horizon, part of Reality Labs, to help teams work out what AI tooling is actually good for. The talk covered what we tried, what worked, what’s still unproven, and what we discounted, at least for now.
I talked through how we measure whether the tools are actually helping, how agentic AI has become part of day-to-day coding, and how standalone agents behave more like early-career engineers than dumb machines. The other half of the talk was about people rather than tools: the leadership work of helping engineers build judgement with this stuff, and why platform integrations moved quality and enjoyment more than any single tool did.
Thank you to the Tessl team for the invitation.