BDEN Meetup #5 – AI Security & The Golden Path

On February 24th, the Belgian Developer Experience Network (BDEN) community gathered again for our fifth meetup, this time for an evening exploring secure AI integrations and developer platform design.

Hosted with a full room of developers, architects, and platform engineers, the night featured two technical talks, live demos, and plenty of discussion around how modern teams can build systems that are both powerful and secure.

The Talks

🤖 MCP: Threats, Tools, and a Few (Hacking) Demos

Speaker: Philippe Bogaerts (Public Cloud System Engineer & Co-Founder of BruCON)

Philippe kicked off the evening with a deep dive into the Model Context Protocol (MCP) - an emerging open standard that allows large language models to interact with external tools, data sources, and services.

The session started with a clear explanation of the MCP architecture, covering the client–server interaction model, transport modes, and capability registration. This gave attendees a practical understanding of how MCP enables LLM-powered agents to extend their functionality.

From there, Philippe moved into hands-on demonstrations, using MCP Inspector to debug and analyze model-tool interactions in real time.

A major focus of the talk was the security implications of these integrations. Philippe demonstrated how AI models can analyze tool descriptions to detect unsafe capabilities and showed how the Capability-Delta Hack can potentially allow models to escalate or extend their access.

The session combined technical exploration with security awareness, giving attendees both defensive insights and a clearer view of the attack surface around AI-powered tooling.

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🛤 The Golden Path: Where Governance Meets Software Craftsmanship

Speaker: Jonathan Lamy (Solution & Enterprise Architect @ Devoteam)

After the break, Jonathan Lamy explored how organizations can balance governance, security, and developer productivity through the concept of the Golden Path.

Jonathan challenged the common belief that shipping code faster automatically means delivering more value. While many teams have embraced Agile and DevOps, deployment anxiety and operational complexity still slow down real progress.

His proposal: focus on engineering confidence.

By treating the platform as a product, organizations can embed best practices directly into their infrastructure. Instead of forcing developers to navigate complex compliance and configuration requirements, the platform itself provides a frictionless path to production.

Through examples and demos, Jonathan showed how well-crafted platforms can automate security and compliance while enabling teams to ship reliably and confidently.

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Food, Networking & Conversations

As always, the evening continued with food, drinks, and lively conversations 🍕🍻.

Attendees discussed everything from AI tool security and MCP experiments to platform engineering strategies and real-world developer experience challenges. It was great to see both new participants and familiar faces connecting and exchanging ideas.

These conversations are what make BDEN special — bringing together people who care about building better developer experiences and learning from one another.

Looking Ahead

A big thank you to Philippe and Jonathan for sharing their knowledge and insights, and to everyone who joined us for another great BDEN evening. 🙌

We’re already working on ideas for the next meetup, so make sure to follow our Meetup page to stay up to date.

See you at the next BDEN event! 🚀

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