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

Programming isn't going away, it's splitting in two. Jessica Kerr on Still Burning: "If you want to build a bookshelf, that's a craft. But there's also IKEA." The code-crafting got commoditized. Knowing what to build didn't.

"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...

"Peaked on Twitter" is the new "Peaked in high school"

The headline should be “Trump announces he will embezzle $1.776 billion dollars”. It is a crime, not a law. Elect a Democrat who won’t pretend crimes are normal: bethfordemocracy.com

Thank you for everyone who came out to our meet and greet yesterday.

Genies in the Forest & the Desert--once again genies reflect & amplify what already exists. The Desert becomes the desert but now you're alone. The Forest becomes the forest with whole new sources of food & shelter.

The assumption seems to be that the best use we have for people is eliminating their salaries.

murderbot day

AI tools don't muddle along with us. They fall below muddling, plausible deniability disguised as code. Low features, low flexibility, complexity stacking until even the genie gives up.

There's one concept from economics that explains almost every disagreement I've ever had about work and money. I've been teaching it for 30 years. Turns out I wasn't fully applying it to myself.

If the agent writes 1,000 lines in seconds, maybe you can finally let go of them. "When you can easily regenerate it, it feels less valuable. And that makes it easier to throw away." We've always struggled with sunk cost in code. AI might be solving that accidentally. More on E3 of Still Burning.

The first episode was very compelling. Looking forward to the actual interviews!

I want LiveCodeBench but showing how many tokens/€s/KWhs it takes to get to 100%. Not interested in scores less than 100%.

14th Amendment (1868): “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Seems pretty clear to me.

We're blacksmiths. Some of what we know transfers to this new world. Some of it doesn't. Figuring out which is which is our next greatest challenge. 🎧 Still Burning ep. 1 —

10 years from now, who even knows what part of software development will still be a human activity? Nobody Knows.

It's a little odd to me how influenced I am when a company's giveaway pens are really high quality. I end up thinking they must do everything well. Which has so far been true.

Lovely turn of a phrase

Knocking on doors yesterday, I met a six year old. She asked me what Congress was. I told her, "it's the people who make the rules for grownups." I didn't tell her that right now some grownups aren't following the rules. Congress should do its job and put them in timeout.

A new podcast, hosted by yours truly, coming soon...

I hate the re-soloing of development. We were so close to learning social skills, creating community, encouraging creativity & purpose, & applying empathy. Easier to manage if each of us is so busy with our genieswarms that we don't have time to talk & reflect.

What do you do when everyone wants everything now?

Jesse Jackson gave me words to live by—“I’m a tree shaker, not a jelly maker”

I've spent the last year deep in augmented coding — how genies change what programmers do & don't do. Now I'm curious what that looks like in govtech, where shipping isn't theoretical. Speaking at @Rise8's ShipSummit, Park City, March 31 - April 2.

❓ THIS WEEK'S ONE BIG QUESTION: What Skills Do Developers NEED To Have In An AI Future? ❓ @trishagee.bsky.social / @kentbeck.com AVAILABLE NOW | WATCH HERE ➡️ youtu.be/lJiDBRh96oU

@kentbeck.com ’s The Forest & The Desert Are Parallel Universes at GOTO CPH 2025 explored how similar behaviors lead to opposite outcomes - and how to get from crumbs to cake. 2026’s lineup looks incredible.

Inviting English hate monger Graham Linehan to Congress is bullshit. Actual parents are terrified their children will lose access to medical care. Republicans respond by importing lying bigots to lie. I am running for Congress so they have to say this shit to my face: bethfordemocracy.com

If software development is human communication & two parties are speaking different languages, we regain hope for mutual progress when we realize that we are speaking different languages (even though we use the same words).

Why The "10x Engineer" Is A Dangerous Myth | with Charity Majors 📽️ AVAILABLE NOW Watch: youtu.be/aDCOuZ80lDQ

experienced engineers: one change, test, one change, test junior engineers: batch everything because they're in a hurry this is exactly backwards the person least capable of batching is the one most likely to batch

enjoyed @kentbeck.com on bridges open.substack.com/pub/tidyfirs...

It's been hard (it's being hard?) to learn how to make human connections. It's still a learnable skill.

I know we're in the "horseless carriage" stage of augmented development & it's too soon to know what the "real" name is of this new activity, but... ...the genie suggested "wishcraft" & I don't hate it.

Slices fail when they're too small to provide feedback. But no amount of features fixes a flawed premise. Go smaller, but ask questions with what you build.

Whatever happened to furniture polish. I know it must still exist but the ads for Lemon Pledge used to be everywhere. Did we all just become inured to dull furniture

Models suddenly getting good enough to write most of my code - which I am now prompting - creates complicated feelings. It took a long time to get good at coding. And it's not easy. Plus, there was something special about being in "the zone." Full: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-grief-wh...