Surviving Your Own Velocity: How VS Code Ships Weekly with 40 People
Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 3:20pm-3:40pm
- Track/room: Track M · Track M
- Speaker(s): Harald Kirschner
- Session type/status: sponsor · confirmed
- Track: Track M
- Room: Track M
- Session type: sponsor
- Status: confirmed
Session Description
A ~40-person team ships VS Code weekly to millions of users. Models got good enough to lean on, and leaning in is exactly what broke our process. This talk is the part most AI talks skip: what you have to rebuild after agents start working. We had to scale three things at once: how fast we ship, how we hold quality, and how fast we learn, and each one we fixed revealed the next. I'll walk through the harnesses, evals, and self-healing systems that keep velocity from becoming regression, and the patterns you can steal.
Media Evidence
Real World Development with GitHub Copilot and VS Code — Harald Kirschner, Christopher Harrison (speaker-match related prior/adjacent AI Engineer video; captions: English auto-captions).
- Source video:
youtube-eOxOzcw70f0 - Slide deck: Dense Slides: Real World Development with GitHub Copilot and VS Code — Harald Kirschner, Christopher Harrison — no readable content slides after AI classification.
- Additional slide evidence: Slides: Real World Development with GitHub Copilot and VS Code — Harald Kirschner, Christopher Harrison, Reconstructed Slides: Real World Development with GitHub Copilot and VS Code — Harald Kirschner, Christopher Harrison
- Slide-derived themes for
youtube-eOxOzcw70f0: code, vibes, learning, clone, even, exists, fully, give.
Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.
Media Signals
youtube-eOxOzcw70f0— 10 slide-derived text signals- Slide-derived themes for
youtube-eOxOzcw70f0: code, vibes, learning, clone, even, exists, fully, give. - Evidence links for
youtube-eOxOzcw70f0: youtube eOxOzcw70f0, youtube eOxOzcw70f0 slides, youtube eOxOzcw70f0 dense slides, youtube eOxOzcw70f0 reconstructed slides
Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.
Transcript Status
Related video transcript availability: English auto-captions. Treat this as supporting context, not a recording of this exact scheduled session unless later confirmed. Not fetched yet.
People
Supporting Slides
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 slides — extracted from the related public AI Engineer video.
Slide Evidence
- Slide-only cropped deck: youtube eOxOzcw70f0 dense slides (1 viable slide images).
- Related slide/OCR pages:
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 dense slides
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 reconstructed slides
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 slides
- Slide-derived terms:
microsoft,chat,sfair,edit,copilot,smol,worid,character,workspace,yolo,open,accept,suggestion,continue,create,letme,vibes,code
Synthesis
Synthesized Breakdown
Surviving Your Own Velocity: How VS Code Ships Weekly with 40 People ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 3:20pm-3:40pm - Track/room: Track M · Track M - Speaker(s): Harald Kirschner - Session type/status: sponsor · confirmed - Track: Track M - Room: Track M - Session type: sponsor - Status: confirmed ## Session Description A ~40-person team ships VS Code weekly to millions of users. Models got good enough to lean on, and leaning in is exactly what broke our process. This talk is the part most AI talks skip: what you have to rebuild after agents start working. We had to scale three things at once: how fast we ship, how we hold quality, and how fast we learn, and each one we fixed revealed the next.
Speaker And Company Context
- Harald Kirschner — Principal Product Manager at Microsoft.
Topics Covered
Derived Links And Source Material
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 — related YouTube source page.
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 slides — slide evidence.
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 reconstructed slides — slide evidence.
- youtube eOxOzcw70f0 dense slides — slide evidence.
Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.
Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.