Webinar

Code Centric Eval First Development: Accelerating AI Features for Devs

With

Dru Knox

13 May 2025

In the world of AI-native development, evals aren’t just quality gates, they’re powerful design tools. Especially for codegen products, targeted evals can drive clarity, speed, and alignment across teams. This session dives into how code-centric evals can be used to prototype developer-facing AI features, bring cross-functional (XFN) stakeholders into the loop early, and set measurable goals for launch quality. Learn how to evolve your product rapidly with user feedback loops grounded in meaningful code evaluations—treating evals like the “Figma mock” for AI coding tools.

About The Speaker

Dru Knox

Head of AI, Product, Tessl

Dru Knox is Head of AI, Product at Tessl, where he leads the development of AI-native tools purpose-built for developers. A seasoned product manager, Dru has spent his career working on deeply technical and developer-facing products at companies like Google and Airtable. Over the past several years, he’s focused on machine learning and generative AI at scale, driving product innovation at Grammarly, his own startup, and the AI-native social network Cantina.

Dru is passionate about making LLM-powered products that are fast, useful, and intuitive, especially in the codegen space. He brings a thoughtful, pragmatic approach to building tools that serve real developer needs, grounded in experience across both big tech and startups.

Outside of work, Dru’s interests include improv comedy, Dungeons & Dragons, and philosophy. His favorite podcasts are Cortex, The Adventure Zone, and Sharp Tech. Originally from Virginia, he’s currently based in London and still counts winter (and snow) as his favorite season.

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