Kent Beck

@kent-beck · 38 positions · On ppll ↗

Creator of extreme programming and test-driven development, an original signatory of the Agile Manifesto, and the author of Test-Driven Development: By Example and Tidy First?

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What Kent Beck says most about

software quality 6

Facebook could ship safely without much unit testing because it had many independent layers of feedback, each one catching what the earlier layers missed.
Having an AI agent write tests costs tokens in the short run and saves them in the long run, because the classic failure is that the code does not work.

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coding agents 5

When an AI agent runs out of forward progress, throw the project away and start over rather than trying to tweak it.
Having an AI agent write tests costs tokens in the short run and saves them in the long run, because the classic failure is that the code does not work.

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design 4

An outside expert's understanding of somebody else's problem is bounded, because they do not have to live with the design after they leave.
Moving the computation to where the data lives is the fundamental design move in object-oriented programming, and it got lost in the noise.

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AI and jobs 3

Saying that coding will be automated away first betrays a misunderstanding of software engineering, because coding is only a small part of the work.
The wish to get rid of all the programmers keeps coming back, and programmers ought to ask themselves why, because some of the reason really is about us.

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AI and human skill 2

The satisfaction of getting one function exactly right no longer makes a difference, and an engineer has to let go of it and enjoy understanding the domain instead.
AI has wiped the senior engineer's playbook clean, and writing a playbook is a completely different skill from applying one.

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