Speaking · Vienna AI Engineering

How Codex Saved My Day: Enabling Citizen Developers

Event
Vienna AI Engineering
Lightning Talks
Date
10 March 2026
Place
Vienna, Austria
Format
Lightning talk
Speaker reel · 74 seconds
The results and lessons slide above the audience, Daniil speaking at the right of the stage
Results and lessons
Presenting in front of the problem and the idea slide, gesturing towards the screen
The problem and the idea
The auditorium seen from the centre aisle at the back, the title slide on screen and Daniil at the lectern
Vienna AI Engineering · 10 March 2026
Speaking in front of the overnight autonomous loop slide
The overnight loop

How I built an internal application platform without being a developer, what the overnight agent loop actually produced, and the bug that took ten confident failed fixes before a different model found it in a different layer entirely.

What the talk covers

  • The gap. A six-month IT backlog against a business that needed the thing yesterday — and why no-code tools do not close it.
  • The idea. Log in, get a terminal and a browser, describe the application, deploy it. The people who understand a problem best are the ones who should be building for it.
  • The build. A working platform in two weeks: a container per workspace, isolated networks, a routing layer, deployment workers, and enterprise sign-on.
  • The overnight loop. Plan, write, validate, ship, then test in a real browser — five to eight phases a milestone, running unattended through the night. Adding the browser test is what changed waking up to half-working code into waking up to working features.
  • The wall. A dropping terminal connection, ten separate "I found it" moments, and days lost to a model that read two files and guessed.
  • What fixed it. A second model that researched for an hour before touching anything and traced the fault to a completely different layer of the system.
  • The lesson. Build with one, debug with the other. Speed and greenfield work are not the same skill as depth and architecture.

The line people remember

“We’re not replacing developers. We’re unlocking the 90% of ideas that IT never had time to build.”

Who it is for

Executive teams, boards and conference audiences deciding what to do about AI beyond buying assistants for the team they already have. It assumes no technical background, and it is not a product demonstration.

Where this had reached

At the time of the talk: over a hundred users and a few hundred applications. Five months later the same platform carries roughly 1,900 applications built by around four in ten of the company. The talk is the early part of that story, including the parts that went badly.

The full talk

Thirteen minutes, recorded at the event.