BONUS: DevCon London: Real Talk on AI ROI, Harnesses & Evals

From the expo floor of AI Native DevCon London, Simon Maple went straight to the developers — speakers, attendees, and sponsors — to ask what's actually working with AI in 2026. The verdict? Outcomes beat outputs every time, 4,000-hour workloads are collapsing to 20 minutes, and the real bottleneck isn't code.

This is a conference floor walkthrough: honest, unscripted takes on harness engineering, evals, AI adoption mindsets, and the change management challenge that nobody talks about enough.

What we cover:
– Why measuring token usage, code commits, and outputs will lead your team astray
– How NearForm cut a 4,000-hour AML backlog to 20 minutes using agents
– Harness engineering and evals as the developer skills that matter most in 2026
– Why change management — not tooling — is the missing ingredient for real AI ROI
– How AutonomyAI is letting PMs and designers ship directly to production

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Welcome to AI Native DevCon London
00:01:03 - Chris Baty: Outcomes Over Outputs
00:05:15 - Martin: How Tooling Changed Everything
00:07:21 - Ryan: Harnesses, Evals and Skills
00:08:50 - Manny Saka: Plan Before You Prompt
00:11:58 - Cian O Maidin, NearForm: Real AI ROI
00:15:21 - Snyk: Building Trust at Scale
00:17:01 - AutonomyAI: Shipping Without Engineering
00:21:35 - Tessl Agent: Harness Engineering
00:22:41 - Closing Thoughts

🌐 Tessl: https://tessl.io
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Whether you're cautious or YOLOing it with AI — drop where you land in the comments.