GitHub Copilot DevDays Dubai - AI is Your Copilot, You Are Still the Driver
This weekend I had the pleasure of speaking at GitHub Copilot DevDays, organized by the Azure Middle East community at Coders HQ in Dubai.
The event features a lineup of friends and fellow speakers: Hatim Nagarwala, Ahmad Uzair (always great to share a stage with you again!), Ben Leane, Yellampalli Venkatesh, Dr. S. Gomathi, and Moiz Lokhandwala. It was a day packed with news on GitHub Co-pilot, and I left with plenty of notes.
My talk was “AI is Your Copilot – You Are Still the Driver”, and the core message is something I feel pretty strongly about. A lot of people incorrectly assume that when an AI is generating your code, code reviews become less important. I’d argue the opposite, they matter more than ever!
AI-generated code depend heavily on your prompts and the context available to it, with some bad luck the code can look perfectly reasonable and still be subtly wrong, insecure, or completely misaligned with what you actually wanted.
The good news is that code review prompts can do a lot of the heavy lifting here. Asking the model to review its own output through a well-crafted prompt, one that targets security, readability, edge cases, or whatever matters most for your context - and doing so consistently improves the quality of what you get back. It’s a small habit that makes a real difference, and it keeps you in the driver’s seat rather than just rubber-stamping whatever the AI produced.
It was a great crowd, lots of questions and conversations that carried on well after the session ended, not to mention a lot of very nice feedback <3. That is always the sign of a good day.
🎤 Got an event and need a speaker? Invite me!
📅 Catch my upcoming talks:
- Apr 23, 2026 - DEVOXX GREECE 2026 in Athens, Greece: "But I Just Want to Write Code... Career Advice for Satisfied Developers"
- Jun 02, 2026 - DevSum 2026 in Stockholm, Sweden: "Workshop: Production-Ready Azure Functions: Build, Tune, and Scale High-Performance Serverless Apps"
- Jun 03, 2026 - DevSum 2026 in Stockholm, Sweden: "Azure Functions – Performance Sins and Their Penance"