This talk was given at Future Tech 2026.

Agentic AI dev has taken our industry by storm, from coding agents and AI code reviews to fully AI-powered product experiences. Every week brings a new framework, tool, or platform to learn, and while everyone is speculating about the future of software development, most of us still have to ship real software today. Building apps is both easier AND more complicated than ever. In this keynote, Maddy Montaquila, lead PM for Aspire, shares her grounded perspective from the front lines, drawing on her work making Aspire the best platform for building agentic applications - and making Aspire itself agent-enabled. It's possible to build AI-driven applications with coding agents, without giving up control, clarity, or your sanity. Join Maddy to learn about how using the right abstractions, strong defaults, and guardrails can let AI accelerate development instead of derailing it.

Maddy Montaquila

Senior Product Manager, Aspire at Microsoft

Maddy Montaquila (formerly Leger) is a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft and the product lead for Aspire. She’s been building dev tools at Microsoft since 2018 - before Aspire, she worked across the .NET stack and brought .NET MAUI to life. Maddy has been obsessed with making developers’ lives easier ever since her first dev tools internship, where she realized it perfectly combined her tech background with her passion for product development. These days, she’s focused on making modern distributed app development suck a whole lot less. Maddy’s an experienced speaker who’s presented everywhere from local user groups to major keynotes, known for bringing great energy and a genuine love for dev tools to every talk. You can find her on Bluesky and GitHub at @maddymontaquila!

Keynote: Use AI to build AI (without losing your mind)

Maddy Montaquila

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