VibeConf 2026: Anyone can build. Judgement still matters.

6 October, Pathé Tuschinski, Amsterdam. One room, one track, and a mix of people who normally sit in different meetings: product, design, engineering, marketing, sales, HR, operations. All of them building things with AI.

The room came before the conference

VibeConf did not start as a conference. It started as a monthly meetup in Amsterdam, then workshops, then buildathons where teams had one day to get something running.

The same thing kept happening. Someone who had never shipped software — a recruiter, an ops manager, a marketer — would describe a problem they had lived with for years, and by the end of the day there was a working first version of a fix. Rough, unglamorous, usable.

That is the shift worth talking about. Not that AI can generate things. That the person closest to a problem can now build the first version of the answer, instead of writing a ticket and waiting two quarters.

It also exposed the harder part. Building got cheap. Deciding what deserves to exist, what to keep, what to throw away — that stayed expensive. Anyone can build. Judgement still matters.

The line-up is the argument

The programme is deliberately cross-functional. Read it as four pairs.

Technology and work are changing at the same time. Marijn Markus, AI Lead at Capgemini, opens with “What Changes Next”. Debora Gallo, VP Talent Development at Mews, follows with “When the Job Description Falls Behind” — what happens to roles when the tools move faster than the org chart.

Product culture and design judgement. Jim van der Waal, Head of Product at Polarsteps, on “Permission first, Process second”. Damian Skotzke, Founding Product Designer at Kyoso, on “Dream Machine or Co-Designer?” — one about giving people room to build, one about what the machine is actually for.

Keeping a human voice when polish is cheap. Corinne Aaron, Marketing & Growth Leader, and Elisa Viaud, Organisational Psychologist & Executive Coach, share one keynote: “Your Personal Brand Has an AI Problem.” One talk, two perspectives, on purpose.

Then hands on the machine. Elena Avramenko, founder of modaal.dev, runs “Vibecoding mobile apps for non-tech people”. I run “Build your first useful AI agent” — useful being the operative word.

Talks, live builds and workshops on one track, so nobody has to choose between the argument and the practice.

The current VibeConf 2026 line-up, session by session. Open the full line-up carousel ↗

What I want this day to do

I want people to compare work honestly. Not demos of what a model can do in a vacuum, but what someone actually shipped inside a real company, with the parts that broke still visible.

I want a marketer to see how a designer decides, and an engineer to hear how a talent lead thinks about roles that no longer fit. Those conversations rarely happen at work, and they are the ones that change what gets built.

A good day leaves you with better questions than you arrived with, one clear next build, and two people you can message next week when it stalls.

If that sounds like your kind of room, come. See the programme and tickets ↗ — 6 October, Pathé Tuschinski, Amsterdam.