iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 15/07/2026

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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 14/07/2026

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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 30/06/2026

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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 29/06/2026

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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 28/06/2026

"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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 23/06/2026

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.'"

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 19/06/2026

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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 07/03/2026

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

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 28/02/2026

What do you do when everyone wants everything now?

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 12/02/2026

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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 28/01/2026

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

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 13/01/2026

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.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 18/06/2025

SF history in the gloaming

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 15/05/2025

I've been trying for years to get a decent shot of a bird of paradise flower. I finally got one. Still not perfect but that's what the quest is for.

Orange and blue bird of paradise flower with a backdrop of a spray of luminous green leaves

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 11/03/2025

How Long Should Functions Be? Hint: The Answer's a Distribution, Not a Number tidyfirst.substack.com/p/how-long-s... I'd love to be contradicted with data.

Plot of the CCDF of function lengths showing a clear power law distribution

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 24/02/2025

One way to look at tests is as a filter that lets (most) good changes through & keeps (most) bad changes out. Tests make (most) mistakes reversible. Layer these filters & you get better discrimination at the cost of longer delays & more maintenance.

An illustration featuring emojis arranged in perspective on a turquoise surface with black lines. It includes smiling emojis representing good changes and purple devil emojis representing bad changes. Some emojis are translucent, having fallen through the mesh, but more good than bad.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 14/02/2025

tidyfirst.substack.com/p/caterpilla...

Specialist activities first concentrate in a single team, then that team makes them self-service to avoid becoming a bottleneck.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 27/01/2025

I'm not anti-metric. I'm anti metric abuse. Data mostly asks questions, not answers them. Here's an example of using data to ask questions about who are influential programmers on a project. tidyfirst.substack.com/p/measuring-...

Graph showing that programmers who introduce more files tend to have more of those files changed by others. Duh. But also there is variance above and below the trend line.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 17/01/2025

Here's a sequence I haven't heard discussed. You have a system with tests. You break the system into parts. You add tests for the parts. Now you have redundant coverage. You have the opportunity to trim the system-level tests without losing any confidence in the behavior of the system. Do you?

A system with tests, then the system is broken into parts, then the parts get their own tests, then the tests for the whole system can be radically slimmed.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 15/01/2025

"Space Needle", 12" x 4", acrylic on glass. I love painting scenes with strong emotional connection, in this case my parents taking me to Seattle frequently as a kid.

Pointilist Space Needle at night surrounded by skyscrapers.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 07/01/2025

Untitled, 10” x 8”, oil pen on acetate. One of the cool things about drawing on clear plastic is the background completely changes the picture. Also, new gear inspires—I got the Overseas PMA-520 pen set.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 27/12/2024

My second favorite photo of mine now graces my desk

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 20/11/2024

In the 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract model people ask about the transition from Explore to Expand. How do you know when it's time? Answer: The market tells you. Like this. You can't force it.

BlueSky DAUs were flat for a long time, then "suddenly" jumped.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 18/11/2024

Untitled, 150 cm x 45 cm, acrylic on glass. These abstracts often start with a single gesture, in this case the sort of squid-looking figure on the left. The rest fills itself in around that.

Vivid colors on a black background. Overall chaos by there's also a logic to it. Flows left to right.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 15/11/2024

Untitled, acrylic on plexiglas mirror, 28cm x 23cm, 2022. Of my abstracts people ask, "What does it mean?" The best answer I've found it that this is what the inside of my head looks like. What does it mean? Everything & nothing.

Technicolor doodle. Lots of highly saturated light colors with a big blue swoosh in the middle & dark nozzle (?) in the top left.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 13/11/2024

Deepgeek. I found a new fat-tail distribution. If a line of code is deeply indented, well, it's more likely than a random line to need to be indented further. Voila!

Graph of a fairly smooth pareto distribution with noise at the top end. The graph axes are--vertical, the number of lines with a given depth of indent, horizontal, the depth of indent.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 12/11/2024

One response to #ForestAndDesert has been “I don’t find your distinction helpful because my place is not as bad as the desert you describe”. There’s a big difference depending on where you want to go, even if the current situation looks similar. Cc @bethcodes.bsky.social

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 11/11/2024

?!, 150x45cm, acrylic on double sided mirror. Suspended so it turns with air currents. The viewer & their background become a deliberate part of the image (this is fun to watch).

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 10/08/2023

When searching for topic/audience fit, rather than try & guess whether people will be interested, just publish pretty much everything you write. tidyfirst.substack.com/p/publish-ev…

Impressions per tweet is distributed as a power law.

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 13/07/2023

Today/Tomorrow, 45cmx150cm, acrylic on glass. I've wanted to try this format for a while. Turned out to be harder to think about that I expected so I just fell back on intuition. (Not the final base.)

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Kent Beck @kentbeck.com · 10/07/2023

Untitled, 150cmx45cm (60inx18in), acrylic on glass mirror. This from a series described as "what the inside of Kent's brain looks like". The rainbows in the corner came first this time. The rest filled itself in. A note about the presentation--BlueSky's 4:3 aspect ratio dictated a black background

Colorful doodle with spirals in the corners.

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