MERGE 2026 Draws Over 300 To Discuss AI-Driven Development And Design
The conference shows AI-driven development practitioners organizing around the same question their tooling raises: once building fast is routine, who decides what gets built.
Reporting from 1 source: ASCII.jp.
MERGE 2026, a conference on AI-driven development and design co-hosted by GustoDevelopment and PROTOCORE, was held on Saturday, August 8, 2026, at Sakura Internet's Tokyo Nishi-Shinjuku office and online. More than 300 engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and business developers attended. Five sessions featured 24 speakers, and the AI-driven hackathon AI Designathon 2026, themed AI Native UX 2026, held final presentations and awards across three categories. A larger 2027 edition is planned.
GustoDevelopment runs AI-driven development at client sites and has development bases in India and Pakistan. The company co-hosted the event from the planning stage as a place for the wider community to work through what it says is its own open question in projects and training. Three of the five sessions dealt with the shift directly: generative AI lowering the barrier to implementation, agent-driven development, and the place of UI/UX and design as the line between professionals and non-specialists moves. The hackathon under the theme "AI Native UX 2026" put working prototypes on stage from participants who are not all engineers, competing in Product Build, Agent, and Design Eng categories.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.