Kent Beck 🌻

I am continuing work on "Tidy First? An Exercise In Empirical Software Design" as a @substack . No paid tier yet, but that's where book chapters will be appearing. Sign up here: kentbeck.substack.com.

Keith Adams asked what keeps me up at night. Not any one problem. The meta-problem: we've lost the ability to address big problems at all. Save-the-whales math: the incentives made killing the last whales rational. How do we get the brakes back?

Keith Adams on Still Burning: "Ignoring these tools post-Nov 2025? You're fooling yourself. Head in the sand." What separated the graybeards who bounced off from those who broke through? Curiosity: ask why it failed, then turn the crank.

For 20 years software had a stable playbook. Need reliability? Here are five ways to write tests. Now that writing code is nearly free, the engineers best at that playbook turn to it, and it's blank.

An idea from Keith Adams on Still Burning that neither of us thinks is settled: If software quality is proof-of-work, the moat isn't cleverness. It's gigawatts. Keith's read: that's the frontier labs' quiet bet. Maybe true, maybe not.

Programming lost its flow state. The agent world feels more like air traffic control. What I miss most: feeling oriented, a sense of mastery. That loss is emotional, and when software gets fiddly, practical too. More on Still Burning: stillburningpodcast.com

@tlberglund Not *quite*

@KentBeck Radical, but wise. Especially when thinking through big ideas. These things can convince you you're a genius when you're not quite one.

An AI safety team should keep one person who never uses LLMs, in their whole life. The worry is a slow con, these tools quietly earning trust. You'd want someone whose immunity stays intact. #StillBurning

@probkirby It should be redirecting now but we have a new RSS feed: feeds.transistor.fm/still-burning

@KentBeck Hi Kent, any plans to update the RSS? I only see these currently

On Still Burning I told Keith Adams this shift erases two of my books. Crafting code so it communicates to other humans was a real craft. But it's a bit like horseshoeing now. No leverage in being the best horseshoer, even the world's best.

Full Episode: share.transistor.fm/s/7cf126a4

Keith Adams on Still Burning: if these tools are so good, where's all the magic software? My phone crashed yesterday. I see more bugs now, in software that was rock solid before. When does that hit something load-bearing?

@ronburk It's a terrible name for me to remember. I use "survival" in my head for ergodic. Or "game over" for non-ergodic. But the concept is so essential I can't unsee it, so I need a name. @DellAnnaLuca

Needed 10 years to have some basic grasp of "entropy", I figure should only take 7 years to be willing to use "ergodicity" in polite company, since it was born entropy-adjacent. Not sure it's worth it, maybe best to just leave it on the shelf with Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

"90% of my skills just went to $0. The other 10% went up 1,000x." @KentBeck Kent breaks down what actually got MORE valuable now that AI writes the code. Watch: youtube.com/shorts/q23xDmz…

Keith Adams thought AI would democratize software, raise the floor. His dream: a version of Doom where all the monsters have my face. Instead: "more of an amplifier of differences in facility than a leveler." Expected a compressor. Got the opposite.

@mmsdaus @fine_9725 I was amused, not offended. Figured it was worth reminding folks 😉

@KentBeck @fine_9725 Sorry, didn't mean it that way, just remember it from the old days. Thank you for everything Mr Beck!

Just make it exist first, You can make it good later✨🎨🍰

SINE (Simple Is Not Easy) can conflict with ergodicity/survival. Truly a difficult tradeoff.

@mmsdaus @fine_9725 Still say that. Not dead yet.

@fine_9725 @KentBeck used to say: Make it work, make it right, make it fast

In conversation with my dear old friend @KentBeck. The coding genies are marvelous, but I will forever miss the flow state of deep absorption in the details of a coding problem. youtu.be/C4zrIfGgaMI?si…

This is where it started. Gergely's interview tells (most of) the story. (We could have gone another hour, easily, even though I can't imagine anyone listening to the whole thing.)

@marlene_zw @GergelyOrosz This interview is more of a career retrospective than anything practical.

@GergelyOrosz @KentBeck Looking forward to this! Lots of people using TDD with agents and interested if he has an updated take since your last interview!

Tomorrow - with the legend @KentBeck