Kelsey Hightower at KubeCon 2026: “Everyone is a junior engineer when it comes to AI”

Kelsey Hightower told The New Stack at KubeCon 2026 that everyone is a junior engineer when it comes to AI.

He urged companies to contribute to and maintain open-source projects rather than rely solely on AI-generated code.

KubeCon and co-located KubeAuto Day Europe in Amsterdam drew a record 13,500 attendees and discussions about dependency maintenance after Ingress NGINX was deprecated.