How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry

**Gergely Orosz** (0:00)
Kent Beck is one of the living legends of the industry. He's greatly shaped the software engineering profession and keeps impacting it even today. But there's not been a podcast episode covering his whole career from start to present, until today. In this conversation, we cover how Kent grew up with computers in the 70s and how he fell in love with Smalltalk, the origin stories behind TDD, Extreme Programming and the Agile Manifesto, and while Agile, the word, was a mistake. Lesser known stories like how he got fired from Apple, Kent's last decade in the 2000s, and why he thinks TDD has failed, how he thinks about and uses AI, and what still excites him with coding after 40 plus years, and many more. If you'd like to understand how True Legends was shaped by the industry and shapes software engineering himself, this episode is for you. This episode is longer than most of my podcast episodes, and I do hope that you'll find that it's worth the time to listen to Kent longer than he's ever told his story in one setting before. This episode is presented by Antisys.
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Kent, it's so good to have you in person on the podcast.

**Kent Beck** (2:01)
It's great to talk to you again.

**Gergely Orosz** (2:03)
Yeah, I want to kick off with something really timely.
There was this tweet going viral by Dario where he said, I quote, coding is going away first than all of software engineering. You had some things to say about it.

**Kent Beck** (2:17)
Yeah, my response is that that's a statement by someone who doesn't understand software engineering. Coding is part of what you're doing, but it's only a small part of what you're doing.
Even if it takes up a fair amount of time, you're building confidence, you're building connections with other people, you're building your own understanding. All those things are happening while you're coding. Coding is actually a great way to cement understanding. The more you program, the more you understand the domain that you're working in. So to say, well, we're just going to pass all that off to a machine, well, that's not all there is to it.

**Gergely Orosz** (3:00)
Interesting, because one thing that is so obvious with LLMs is they just code really quickly, right? Like it used to take us a lot of time to both type it out and also thinking out, but you're saying that there was thinking involved and understanding involved as well in that process, right?

**Kent Beck** (3:18)
So, a couple of days ago, I saw a phrase, and it really hit me, that we're accumulating code faster than we're accumulating trust, and that sense of trust comes from me struggling to understand some domain concept. I get it. I represent it in the code. I write tests that demonstrate that I really did understand it, and now I trust my program.
But if we're programming together, that act of programming together means that we trust each other more. If we talk to someone, an eventual user, and we demonstrate that we understand their needs, and they tell us, well, I want a button that does this, and we're like, well, what problem are you really solving? And we go back and forth and back and forth. That builds human trust as well.
None of that can be automated. None of that occurs if we prompt the, we get the finger guns, you know, the genie goes, yeah, it's all finished, boss. And it's like, well, hang on, finished, what's finished?