Writing Code Is No Longer the Job: Dana Lawson on Trusting AI Agents Like Self-Driving Cars // CTO @ Netlify

Dana Lawson's path into tech started with backup tapes, not a keyboard-in-the-womb origin story. She joined the US Army in the late '90s, managed the Department of Defense's early SaaS systems, and automated her way out of manual password resets. From there: VP of Engineering at GitHub, and now CTO of Netlify.

This conversation goes straight to the thing every CTO is quietly debating with their team: Is writing code still the job? Dana's New Stack piece, "Writing Code Is No Longer The Job," lit up Hacker News, and she doesn't back off the argument here, including the self-driving car analogy for trusting AI agents, and why Netlify rebuilt its platform around "agent experience" instead of just developer experience.

CTOs will walk away with a sharper way to think about where human judgment still matters versus where it's already been commoditized, plus a useful reframe for the fight over control, ownership, and who gets to build.

• Dana's path from the US Army to GitHub to CTO of Netlify
• Why "writing code is no longer the job" and the Hacker News backlash
• The self-driving car analogy for trusting AI agents
• "Agent experience" and why Netlify redesigned its platform around it
• Whether CMS and databases survive the agent era
• Her "30 apps in 30 days" challenge