Kinsey Durham Grace

Kinsey Durham Grace

Infrastructure Engineer, GitHub

Kinsey is an engineer on the Coding Agent Platform team at GitHub. She’s keynoted and spoken at over a dozen conferences worldwide and led GitHub’s Adacats women-in-engineering ERG. Outside of work, she’s chasing trout in the Colorado mountains.

Agent-Proof Your Rails App: Your Codebase Is the Prompt

When AI agents write code in your repo, your codebase becomes the context window. Messy conventions, implicit knowledge that lives in people’s heads, and inconsistent patterns aren’t just tech debt anymore — they’re the reason the agent writes bad code.

Working on GitHub’s agent platform, I’ve seen firsthand what makes codebases easy or hard for agents to work in. This talk shares what we’ve learned about making large Rails apps legible to coding agents: teaching AI your conventions through custom instructions and agent skills, where consistency investments pay off in agent accuracy, and where to keep humans in the loop. With real before-and-after examples, you’ll leave with a playbook for making your Rails app agent-friendly — which also makes it more human-friendly.