SHIFT Forum 2026 — Manifesto Launch Recap

SHIFT started as a question that kept coming up in engineering teams across the region: AI writes code faster than we can review it — so what does it still mean to engineer software? We did not think the answer was to slow down. We thought the answer was to be explicit about the discipline.

So we wrote it down. Four values. Fifteen principles. A preamble that says what we actually do: we specify, design, prototype, build, document, test, deploy, maintain, and monitor — at the speed of AI, with the rigor of engineering.

Over two days at Universidad de los Andes we put that document in front of the people it is for. Eight talks took it apart from every angle — cognitive maturity, requirements, architecture for agents, spec-graphs, QA in regulated environments, and the legal reality of AI-generated code. Eight parallel workshops made it practical: attendees mapped their own projects to specification graphs, designed test strategies with AI, and moved from vibecoding to engineering in a live editor.

A panel with engineers from Mercado Libre, Nubank, EPAM, and SURED closed the second day by arguing about where this all goes. Then we read the manifesto out loud, and people signed it — on paper and on an iPad at the booth. Those signatures are still coming in.