The Fifth Elephant
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The Fifth Elephant Pune edition

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Karun Japhet

@javatarz

What Happens Before and After the Code? AI Has a Role There Too

Submitted Sep 19, 2025

Indicate the track in which your submission fits: Tack 1 AI in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Type of submission: 30 mins talk

Most conversations about AI in software engineering focus on code generation. But for experienced engineers and tech leads, writing code is rarely the hardest part of the job. The real challenges lie in designing systems, clarifying requirements, building shared understanding, and keeping software healthy once it’s live.

In this session, we’ll explore how AI can help across the entire software lifecycle:

  1. Before development, by sharpening requirements and shaping design decisions.
  2. During development, by supporting test strategies and code quality.
  3. After release, by accelerating debugging and operational problem-solving.

Audience for the session

The audience for this talk is engineers and technical leaders who want to go beyond the hype and see practical ways AI can reduce friction in everyday work.

What problem / pain are you trying to solve (for the audience)?

Attendees will walk away with concrete examples and patterns for using AI not just as a code assistant, but as a partner in clarity, quality, and long-term maintainability.

What will be the scope of your session?

Showcase techniques that will help you use AI assistants more effectively to help build quality software

How will participants benefit from your session?

The session will help widen the perspective that attendees currently have about how to use tools like Copilot and Claude Code more effectively. I will showcase effective techniques for

  1. prompt engineering
  2. context engineering
  3. meta prompting
  4. chain-of-thought prompting
  5. few-shot prompts
  6. avoiding few-shot prompts and being able to one-shot prompt certain type of problems

What is the appropriate format for your session?

Talk through slides and (some) code. Optionally, live coding parts of the feature during the session.

Speaker Bio

Karun is a technology leader at Sahaj Software with extensive experience in delivering enterprise-grade solutions across industries like ad-tech, finance, telecommunications, energy, and gaming.

Karun provides strategic guidance to clients on architecture and technology roadmaps, enabling them to build robust platforms and products. He also currently helps run the operations for Sahaj’s Pune office as it’s Office Lead. A recognized speaker, he has presented at global conferences, meetups, and podcasts, covering topics such as event-driven architectures, machine learning for fraud detection, and serverless microservices.

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