We Thought AI Transformation Was About Adopting Agents. We Were Wrong. | Vinay Perneti, Augment Code

Augment Code gave every engineer frontier agents and expected 2–3x productivity. They got 20–30%. Vinay Perneti, VP of Engineering at Augment Code, shares the inside story of Augment's own AI-native transformation — the mistakes, the wake-up calls, and what it actually took to get the step-function change. In this talk, Vinay covers: + The November 2025 moment when gifted engineers said it no longer made sense to write code by hand + The METR "super exponential": why agents may be 10x more capable within a year + Three myths: AI native is a destination, transformation can be driven top-down, and it's purely a technical problem + Why 89% of engineers fear their skills will become irrelevant — and why leaders must address the human side + Slowing down to speed up: the two-day offsite that unlocked the team + Theory of constraints applied to engineering: if coding is no longer the bottleneck, where did it go? + How human roles shifted to spec review, prioritization, and intent review while agents run autonomously Recorded live at Engineering Leadership LIVE, hosted by Augment Code at Shack15 in San Francisco. Learn more about Augment Code: https://augmentcode.com