Programmer, coach coach, artist, pokerist, singer/guitarist. Learning to be me. Blogging at tidyfirst.substack.com. Mastodon: @kentbeck@hachyderm.io
Joined October 2008
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259 Photos and videos
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27 Jan 2021
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/.
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Kent Beck 🌻 retweeted
Jun 5
Kudos to Anthropic for saying this, even if it’s buried in the middle of the article.
That said: acceleration of what, exactly? You know, even a tiny change in a big ball of mud results in a huge number of changed lines 🤔
"Lines of code is an imperfect measure, as it measures quantity over quality. So 8× lines of code/engineer/day in the second quarter of 2026 is almost certainly an overstatement of the true productivity gain. Nonetheless, it indicates an acceleration."
Jun 4
Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor.
It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. anthropic.com/institute/recu…
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Jun 3
Jevons paradox: coal got cheaper, so we used more coal. Not less.
@randyshoup thinks the same thing is about to happen with cognition.
Latest Still Burning episode is live now! share.transistor.fm/s/bfd572…
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May 20
Acceleration and a step function shift are not the same thing. Most companies are preparing for one and about to experience the other.
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May 20
Michael Grinich sees across hundreds of companies in real time. When he says the whole industry is moving faster, not just the AI companies, I believe him.
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May 10
Just listened in on a customer service call with @Chewy. No phone tree. No rush. Warm, human, and above all effective as to the purpose of the call.
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Kent Beck 🌻 retweeted
The Democratic Establishment is trying to rig a primary in Massachusetts. And they're using AI money to help.
Stand up to this by going to bethfordemocracy.com and donating to help us reboot democracy.
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May 7
Misheard (I assume) a speaker say, "A rising tide lifts all goats," and thought yeah that sounds pretty good glad they can swim.
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May 6
The assumption seems to be that the best use we have for people is eliminating their salaries.
I don't think that's the only option. New Still Burning episode with @techgirl1908
feeds.transistor.fm/still-bu…
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Kent Beck 🌻 retweeted
May 6
I'll be a keynote speaker at @CraftConf on 4 June, in Budapest, Hungary. It's one of my favorite conferences, and the speaker lineup simply stellar. @KentBeck and many others will be there.
If you'll be there: catch you at the event! Details tickets: craft-conf.com/2026
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Apr 29
Genies don't muddle. They sink below muddling — code that doesn't work and can't be changed. Two axes: does it work? can it change? Genies underperform on both. Nobody knows the fix yet. Awareness is step one. tidyfirst.substack.com/p/gen…
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Apr 28
Smart (as ever) take on why debating "intelligence" is the wrong approach.
I first made contact with the AI eschatology community in 2013, when I was starting FAIR. They are perhaps the people whose ideas about AI have changed the least in the last 13 years. Why?
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Apr 26
Dario demonstrating that he doesn't understand software engineering. The human side of what we do has always been the heart. I can empathize with *wanting* to never talk to an engineer ever again, but engineering becomes more important with better tools.
Anthropic CEO (Dario Amodei):
"Coding is going away first, then all of software engineering."
What do you think about this?
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Apr 24
A billion dollars in 30 years. I wouldn't take it. And I can prove that's not crazy.
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Apr 24
There's a concept in economics that completely changed how I think about work, money, and time. I've been teaching it to engineers for 30 years. Most of them don't apply it to themselves.
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Apr 24
My Parkinson's diagnosis forced me to. Here's what I found. tidyfirst.substack.com/p/ext…
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Apr 22
I think now is a great time to be a junior developer.
But I'm worried.
The pressure juniors feel: I was hired to do a thing. The faster I do it, the prouder they'll be.
But you can go very fast in exactly the wrong direction.
The most important skill, stepping back and starting over, is being optimized away.
Ep. 03 of Still Burning is out now.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Apr 21
Announcing Thinkies World Congress II May 20, 2026 at 0800 PDT. Thinkies are creative habits to unstick stuck thinking. I began collecting them to answer the frequent question, "How did you think of that?" Now we have almost 100 Thinkies & an international community applying them, teaching them, & illustrating them. thinkies.org/congress/twc-2/
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Apr 14
Claude has passed the threshold to being completely unusable for me for coding. Timeouts, infinite (seeming) stalls, forget it. Someone let me know when it comes back from wherever it went. (And this with a Pro plan)
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Apr 10
AI just reset everyone's ignorance to 100.
Doesn't matter how senior you are. Doesn't matter how clean your code is. We're all starting over.
Kent Beck @mipsytipsy on Still Burning → podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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