iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I new joiner on my team had a pretty nice idea. Learning how to operate in an unfamiliar codebase is daunting so I suggested adding a special “I’m new to this team so I need extra guidance while working” to the pi APPEND_SYSTEM.md Brilliant

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Absolutely *love* this book! It was exactly what I needed when I became lead engineer. Fist-to-five, leader speeks last, andon cord etc. it made me realize that I was being too much of a “red Fred” and helped me find a much better balance

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Better than ever! #mmmss has never been easier. Prototypes has never been easier. Refactoring has never been easier. Behavior focused testing has never been easier. TBD has never been easier. AND it also happens to be the most token efficient way of developing software

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

INSTANT 50% TOKEN COST REDUCTION!!! Pair programming

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Agents not being able to consistently follow a simple red, green, refactor loop should be evidence enough that “long running autonomous agents” is a bad idea.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Of all the XP practices forgotten/overlooked be mainstream SWE culture, empathy is the one I miss the most

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Agreed! But it’s still an open question how to set up this pachinko machine to emulate the design pressure of TDD.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

The more powerful the LLMs become the clearer it is that there are some things they simply can’t do. It’s more than just “taste”. It’s the total lack of understanding of software design

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Well defined behavior focused tests at the right seams is paramount for effective development (agentic or otherwise).

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

The best software design teacher I ever had was TDD. Instead of passively sitting around waiting for experience to accumulate by it self, TDD expedites learning. Future software engineers should be trained in manual (canon) TDD before moving on to agent based workflows.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

There is no increase in productivity without an equally increase in comprehensibility.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Hard pill to swallow: The average engineer has never heard about XP, TDD, TBD, refactoring, simple design, dependency inversion, ports and adapters or continuous delivery 😔

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

We don’t use LLMs for review but we do have have a lint pass where we have identified regularly occurring issues and call them out (issues which can be identified automatically go in our actual linter)

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There are some noticeable parallels between agentic guidance and leadership theory. Is all about creating an environment which doesn’t just enable the right outcomes but make them inevitable

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As the throughput of the team increases we need more effective ways to align human to human too

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@birgitta410.bsky.social a fun kind of sensor we’re trying out in my team is visualizing architecture by hexagonal “roles” by analyzing the codebase (deterministically) through introspection. This results in an interactive graph of use cases, ports and collaborators.

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My current workflow is to work at the Hexagonal Architecture level of abstraction first and then define acceptance tests in small coherent batches.

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For years I (too) would be pedantic about TDD being “once small test” at a time. But “gearing” was always part of the equation and the agents do allow bigger bolder steps.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

“Brevity is the soul of wit” I’m looking at you Fable and GPT-6

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TDD is still extremely crucial when working with agents. Tests or small batches of tests are perfect at strong prompting

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Working effectively with agents is all about decomposing work in to comprehensible, verifiable, working slices which can be committed straight to main.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

I pi as my agent harness primarily so that I can add to APPEN_SYSTEM.md ‘’’ - us impersonal language ‘’’ I do not want to in a parasocial relationship with my work tools

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

The real bottleneck is still (and will always remain) *what* problems to solve

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Software quality (e.i ability to change safely) is absolutely not dead. If anything it is more important than ever. If “code is cheap” then customers should expect more for less. This creates quality pressure.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Are people seriously going all stacked diffs rather than just do TBD?

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Working in small batches of coherent acceptance tests gives a nice balance between speed and confidence

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

There is a lot more nuance to agentic development than the zeitgeist allows for

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Reposted by I talk SWE

joesteel.bsky.social @joesteel.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Tell me again how your carefully curated specs can mitigate this? Good fundamentals, good tests (ideally with mutation testing) are absolutely essential. Even then, you're not fully covered. The genie can be helpful, but always be careful what you ask for and verify what you get. It won't be liable

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I guess this is what you get when the mantra is “software engineering is dead”

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> Money is always BigDecimal, never double. Omg this is parody levels of bad

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At its heart software development is all about creative problem solving. Agent are a true force multiplier but they are no replacement for the raw humanity at the center of the creative process

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Long running autonomous swarms of agents is a recipe for disaster

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Agents are really bad at storing skills for agents

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If a skill defines new agent behavior it should list each distinct piece of guidance instead of Hemingwaying in between the lines

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Many SKILLs read like prose which I don’t think optimal. It makes it hard to change in a structured way.

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

In my team we are seeing a tremendous boost to effectiveness with the help of agents. Not by swarming or automation but by empowering people to work better. Improve collaboration with more informed conversations, greet higher quality feedback with many more rapid prototypes.

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I’ve really come to appreciate how crucial TDD was in teaching me to externalizer my thinking

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

People are (still) the moat

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I talk SWE @italkswe.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

We’ve been improving our agentic guidance by replacing verbose descriptions with “common conceptual shorthands”

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Well established patterns such as hexagonal architecture provide a wonderful off-the-shelf ubiquitous language with the agents

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I guess one of the hardest things about teaching is remembering how it is to not know

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I’m bullish on Software Engineering fundamentals

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Agents can be a real force *multiplier* not *addition*

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