What Thorsten Ball thinks about software quality
Co-founder of Amp and co-host of the Raising an Agent podcast. Wrote Writing an Interpreter in Go.
Thorsten Ball did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
Filter software quality · Newest first
Only Thorsten Ball on software quality. See everyone on software quality
11 dated positions, 2015 to 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Thorsten Ball has said — not written or endorsed by them.
-
Their wordsReview only code with high blast radius. There are <5 central files -- those I review. Database migrations, yes. Closure vs. class, a neater type, variable names, even duplication: I don't care anymore.
- 8 days earlier
-
Their wordsYou can now have a team that ships fast, ships a lot, makes a ton of money, delights customers, builds a great product that's beloved AND no code reviews, no PRs, without yoloing to main.
- 2 weeks earlier
-
Their wordsIf you believe that Rust isn't needed for agents anymore because they're good at mem alloc then you also have to believe aspects of testing become useless.
- 1 day earlier
-
Their wordsIf it works, if it's performant, if it has no bugs, if you understand how it works, if the agent can modify it a month from now, to your liking, is it slop?
- 7 days earlier
-
Their wordsWhat will matter in future is runtime behavior: Performance characteristics, resource usage, failure modes, observability, debuggability, deployments, rollbacks. And legibility of all that to agents.
- 6 days earlier
-
Their wordsin the future, humans won’t find a bug or an issue with the code produced by a model, at least not in a reasonable time. Humans will only review the system and its composition, but it won’t be in PRs and it won’t be by looking through every line of the code.
↗What I believe about the future of software developmentthorstenball.com 1st of 15 in this piece
-
Their wordsMost bugs won’t be “coding” bugs. They’ll be “you asked for the wrong thing” bugs.
↗What I believe about the future of software developmentthorstenball.com 3rd of 15 in this piece
-
Their wordsThere’s no proof that “good code” will matter in the future. The notion of “good code” itself is mostly based on the idea that it’s easy/cheap/efficient for humans to work with. But humans won’t modify the majority of code.
↗What I believe about the future of software developmentthorstenball.com 11th of 15 in this piece
- 4 years earlier
-
Their wordsCode has mass. Every additional line of code you don't need is ballast. It weighs your codebase down, making it harder to steer and change direction if you need to.
↗Professional Programming: The First 10 Yearsthorstenball.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
-
Our reading · no longer heldUsing a library is better than writing the code yourself: reuse code as much as you can and don't reinvent the wheel.
Recalls holdingSometimes it’s better to write it yourself than to use other people’s code.
SaidDependencies aren’t free. You have to keep them up to date.
↗Professional Programming: The First 10 Yearsthorstenball.com 3rd of 4 in this piece
- 7 years earlier
-
Their wordsA lot of complex, "look at this clever trick", overly-abstracted, unreadable code works and makes the tests pass.