Kent Beck+

Baking a Model

I remember walking to the bus from high school, staring at a Motorola 6800 instruction set manual.

Busy is Short Volatility

The brutal tyranny of the Kingman Formula

Speculative Short Volatility & Neglectful Short Volatility

Timing is one distinguishing feature of the Tidy First worldview.

Canon 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract

I’ve started a series of Canon articles where I explain my ideas as plainly & unambiguously as possible—no analogies, no persuasion, just the facts.

How Do You Know That?

Stream the latest episode

Long Vol: What is Volatility?

Some basic assumptions:

Long Volatility Development

Outline

The Beginnings of an Idea: XP is Long Volatility

What does this mean?

When Complaints Are Good News

Hint--it's in Explore & Expand

Air Traffic Control

Keith Adams has spent his career at the systems layer, with nine years at VMware, the founding of Facebook's HHVM team, and a run as chief architect at Slack.

The Cost YAGNI Was Never About

If you think YAGNI is about saving effort, cheap generation should retire it. It doesn't. Here's why.

Why So Literal?

On the failure of analogy as a communication device

Smalltalk Genie

Closing the circle

A Learning System Made of Learning Parts

Jessica Kerr joins Kent by the fire to argue that AI didn't take the programmer's job, it split it in two.

You Don't Get to Create Anything

Randy Shoup set out to be an international lawyer.

Trust Factory

“We’re accumulating code faster than we are accumulating trust.” Sometimes a phrase just hits.

Genie Lessons from Genie Sessions: Prose as a Programming Language

Kent sits down with one of the founders of OpenProse to talk through their method of prose as a programming language.

Scope Is The Steering Wheel

This stuck in my craw at the time Patrick published it but I didn’t have the energy to respond.

Itchy Brain

Michael Grinich & Kent Beck on AI adoption, the future of software engineering, and what enterprise developer tools reveal about where tech is headed.

Hey, N00b, We Didn't Hire You to Complete Tasks

Welcome!

Thinkies World Congress II: May 20, 2026

How about a discount?

Thinkie: Wider Scope

Another way a bigger problem can be easier to solve

Thinkie: Wider Scope

Another way a bigger problem can be easier to solve

Thoughts, Not Thinking?

I saw a post on the changing build/buy/customize tradeoff & thought, “I should weigh in.

Thoughts, Not Thinking?

I saw a post on the changing build/buy/customize tradeoff & thought, “I should weigh in.

Did We Do This to Ourselves?

Angie Jones spent years as the "geek whisperer" — translating technical possibility into human progress.

Did We Do This to Ourselves?

Angie Jones spent years as the "geek whisperer" — translating technical possibility into human progress.

Adaptive Radix Tree

Exploring & Explaining a Fast Sorted Map

Run, Right, and Fast for the Adaptive Radix Tree

A recording from Kent Beck's live video

Unstick Your Stuck Thinking

Thinkies World Congress II, online May 20, 2026

Genie Tarpit

Genies give you code that’s a degraded facsimile of the mediocre code it trained on.

Genie Lessons: Nobody Wants Agents

Genie Lesson #5 | Tool: Intent (Augment Code)

Passing Tests Bore Me

Green. Yawn...

Find the North Star

Amelia Wattenberger didn’t want to be a developer — both her parents were, and from the outside it looked boring.

Extreme Time Value of Money: Late-stage Career Planning

First published January 4, 2021, just before this newsletter started.

Parkinson's

Not trying to be subtle here

The Bridge: Too Far

What's wrong with too much?

Potpourri: Lessons from an AI Leadership Conference

This past week I attended Gene Kim’s Enterprise AI Summit.

Run Out to Meet It

Charity Majors spent a year telling engineers they needed to learn to code to stay relevant.

Starving Genies

What 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract says about throttling

Genie Sessions: TCR Skill

A recording from Kent Beck's live video

Tremors

A mystery

Thinkie: Reinforcing Loop

Aka positive feedback loop

Why Your Progress Is About The Same As Everyone Else's

But you aren't looking at every- everyone.