Kent Beck

“Asking questions is a form of leadership” - Kent Beck @kentbeck.com

What would the UX look like if only the human was allowed to type?

The Boots Theory of Software Architecture "Organisations that seem not to have the time or the money to address technical concerns, repay their technical debt or improve their architecture are typically caught in a trap." kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-boots-th...

When I republish old essays I'm reminded of recovering scuttled WW2 submarines for their pre-atmospheric-nuclear-testing steel. Hey, I don't have to prove to you that I typed this with my own meat fingers because it came from 2013.

New on the blog: The Boots Theory of Software Architecture How misaligned priorities can impoverish development kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-boots-th...

I don’t need a special tax on billionaires. I just need them to pay the same percentages that I pay.

I was listening to a "future of AI" conversation & one of the participants said, "Imagine if you had a trillion token context window. You could capture the whole of human experience." And I thought well, perhaps your experience. And then I was sad.

I’ve long said that with the rise of generative AI we need laws that protect people, the environment and our future. I now have a detailed story of what that could look like: bethfordemocracy.com/beth_andres_...

The best HR training I ever attended was led by an ex-Marine. I was the only non-man in the room. We watched the video demonstrating sexual harassment. A young guy piped up, “I just don’t see what the big deal is.” The ex-Marine never raised his voice. He didn’t need to.

If the Free Software Foundation had money, we could make that happen🤷 Lawyers win their seats twice as often as other professions because their lawyer friends disproportionally donate to other lawyers: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #goals

I asked my daughter Beth: how do we get the AI excited about writing tests? "First it needs an endocrine system." The model has no enthusiasm of its own. What exists is us plus the genie. The caring part is still ours.

My daughter Beth, on writing self-driving software in 2008: They told the car "if stuck, relax constraints until you're free." It hit a roadblock, thought a while, and relaxed "don't drive on sidewalks." So it drove onto the sidewalk. "Exactly what I told it. Not what I wanted."

My daughter Beth on Still Burning: A kid learns to count past thirty and says "31." Another asks, "How do you know that?" The first kid is smart. The second one goes further, because she's asking how the solving gets done. That's meta-intelligence, and you can learn it.

On Still Burning with my daughter Beth: a driverless car makes an illegal U-turn, gets pulled over, and there's nobody in the car to ticket. Her reframe: it's not "the computer" driving. It's software a person wrote, under someone's incentives. The responsibility didn't vanish, it just hid.

My daughter Beth's joke: make programmers "work to rule," so they must refactor, test, integrate, collaborate. As a strike it fails, because you'd get more productive. A part we stopped laughing at. Teams did it, shipped great software, and got fired anyway.

My daughter Beth went seven years without writing tests, then converted a whole team. There's a trick she found in code review. Stop pointing out bugs, point out the missing test. Every test caught a bug. "It's your fingers on the keyboard. Write more tests out of defiance."

From my bonus Still Burning with my daughter, Beth Andres-Beck: Why do we keep building agents to run without us? Beth's answer: there's a nervousness about including people at all. We call things "automated" so no one has to be responsible.

Org-design idea from my daughter Beth on Still Burning: the Guild of Guilds. Groups who do similar work compare notes. Then one more guild, of all the guild leaders, catches the company-wide problems no single team can see. How you get recruited? Curiosity. It's a trap.

I asked my daughter Beth what keeps her up at night. Not the robots doing whatever they want. The robots doing exactly what some people tell them to. We're building tech that could be a personal army, where you no longer need anyone else's help to do great harm.

New bonus episode of Still Burning is out. My conversation with my daughter, Beth Andres-Beck. Engineer, ex-self-driving-car programmer, organizer, now running for Congress. On tests, AI agents, and who's accountable when nobody's in the car. Listen and watch: share.transistor.fm/s/54f0099a

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.

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: incentives made killing the last whales rational. How do we get the brakes back?

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

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

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

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 like horseshoeing now: no leverage in being the best horseshoer, even the world's best.

There are few people who have impacted the software engineering industry like @kentbeck.com has. He'd never before told his career story from start to today in one sitting - until now. What a treat: • YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddHQ... • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3M6h...

Tomorrow on The Pragmatic Engineer podcast - with a legend, @kentbeck.com

New word from Jessica Kerr I love: symmathesy — a learning system made of learning parts. People, code, and now agents as a third kind of node, each learning differently. Her kicker: agents read docs every 15 min, not once a year. That's why docs finally stay current.

I asked Jessica Kerr what keeps her up at night. "Two kids to put through college, and I can't say I'll have a job in any city that pays what I want. The market is different now." Her answer: demand will surge, and someone has to design the IKEA furniture. So get great at that.

Jessica Kerr's pinned tweet, and the heart of our Still Burning episode: "I don't want to build software so much as build understanding and express it in software." The new craft: designing a system that produces working code and being able to say why you know it works.

"Human in the loop" — until the loop becomes a noose. Jessica Kerr on Still Burning: if you try to understand everything the agent did, you're stuck. Don't verify the work by hand. Make the agent build the thing that verifies itself.

Hey n00b: nobody cares how many tasks you complete. We hired you for the engineer you'll become, not today's output. We're not measuring your output. We're watching its first derivative. newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/hey-n00b-w...

"We're accumulating code faster than we're accumulating trust." Code you can fix. Trust evaporates in an instant and doesn't come back. XP was a trust factory. Every practice that builds it makes you trustworthy. Vibe coding removes those moments: newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/trust-fact...

Agents can forget. People can't. "Parenting works like this now? 'That didn't work, slash clear. Rewind. Reload my game from before you came in the door.'"

A billion dollars in 30 years. I wouldn't take it. Push "tomorrow" far enough and the future is worth nothing to you. XP knew it: earn sooner, spend later. True for a career, not just code. On money and mortality: newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/extreme-ti...

The FTC is suing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health to try to shut down trans health care. When fascists tell us not to do something, it is time to increase that thing. We can make Congress twice as trans: bethfordemocracy.com

"The Slow" don't exist. They're responding to your incentives. Slash the schedule and people hide progress and inflate estimates. The real lever is scope: how much of which goal, first? Scope is the steering wheel: newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/scope-is-t...

Genies give you a degraded facsimile of the mediocre code they trained on. Two axes: features (works or it doesn't) and futures (optionality). The genie drifts down-and-to-the-left, plausible "success" on broken code. Awareness is step one: newsletter.kentbeck.com/p/genie-tarpit

New on the blog: Sustainable Space A revisit and revision an old pattern of mine for stable code formatting. medium.com/@kevlinhenne...