LeadDev's LDX3 ran in London on 2–3 June 2026, and the message across two days was blunt: the way we build software is in the middle of a fundamental shift, and writing the code is no longer the hard part. The conference is pitched at engineering leaders, and the programme ranged across AI's effect on the development lifecycle, platform engineering, architecture, hiring, and how to actually get technical investment funded. What follows pulls out the learnings that cut across the whole event, then walks through each session in turn — headlined by the talk or workshop it came from.
A quick framing for anyone who didn't attend: when people here talk about the "SDLC" they mean the whole software development lifecycle — the loop that runs from writing a ticket, to building the thing, to reviewing it, to shipping it. The single most repeated idea of the conference was that AI has made the coding step of that loop cheap, and in doing so has shoved the bottleneck onto every