Still Burning

How Do You Know That?

A bonus edition by the fire: Kent talks with his oldest, Beth Andres-Beck — software engineer, one-time self-driving-car programmer, theater major, organizer, and now a candidate for Congress. They start with a cheese pun and end up somewhere serious: why people don't write tests and how you actually get a team to start, what it means that an AI agent has no endocrine system of its own, and who is accountable when "the computer" makes the call. Along the way, a car that solved a roadblock by driving up onto the sidewalk, an org-design trick called the Guild of Guilds, and a kindergartner who asked the most important question there is: how do you know that? This season is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code. Creators & Guests Alyssa Eidam - Producer Kent Beck - Host Beth Andres-Beck - Guest

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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. Now he backs frontier-tech founders at his firm Pebblebed. He and Kent sit by the fire to ask what happens when the twenty-year-old playbook for building software suddenly goes blank. They range across the economics of the shift, from Jevons paradox to software as "proof of work" to a future where the real moat is gigawatts of compute, before turning to what it costs us: the flow state that drew us to programming, now traded for something closer to air traffic control. This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

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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. The part we loved, crafting code by hand, has been commoditized like IKEA furniture. What's left is harder and more human: understanding what to build, proving it works, and stewarding the living "symmathesy" of people, code, and agents all learning from each other. They get into accelerated learning, why play is a signal you're learning, the loop that "becomes a noose," and choosing excitement over fear while the ground keeps shifting. You can find more work from Jessica on her podcast, Machines of Code and Grace. This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

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You Don't Get to Create Anything

Randy Shoup set out to be an international lawyer. He studied in West Berlin when there was still a wall around it, spent a year at Stanford Law, and had what should have been the perfect summer internship on Sand Hill Road. Instead he spent it watching inventors light up whiteboards with brilliant ideas — then being told his job was just to write them down. That summer broke something open. He went back to Oracle that fall and never looked back. Kent and Randy dig into what it means to need to make things, why the people who wrote the original distributed systems playbook aren't panicking about AI wiping it clean, and how Jevons paradox explains what happens when cognition gets cheap. This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

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Itchy Brain

Michael Grinich has an unusual vantage point, his company powers enterprise infrastructure for hundreds of companies, so he sees how the AI transition is actually playing out across the industry, not just in the headlines.What he's noticing: the whole ecosystem is accelerating, not just the AI companies. And most people are misreading what kind of moment this is. Kent and Michael talk about building when the marginal cost of software approaches zero, what the Red Queen theory tells us about AI competition, how engineering leadership is quietly changing, and what drew Michael to the itchy-brained compulsion to make things in the first place. This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

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Did We Do This to Ourselves?

Angie Jones spent years as the "geek whisperer" — translating technical possibility into human progress. Then she led one of the most ambitious AI adoption programs in the industry, and the rug got pulled out. Now at the Agentic AI Foundation, she's working to make sure the standards powering the next era of software are built in the open, by everyone. Kent and Angie dig into the impossible bargain AI has handed engineers, what it really means to hire junior developers right now, and what scares her most about where we're all headed. This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

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Find the North Star

Amelia Wattenberger didn’t want to be a developer — both her parents were, and from the outside it looked boring. Then she accidentally built a website, and everything changed. In this conversation, she and Kent talk about why play matters more right now than productivity, what we actually lose when every project has a KPI attached, and why the most important skill in augmented development might just be knowing when to step back. This season of Still Burning is brought to you in partnership with WorkOS and Augment Code.

Run Out to Meet It

Charity Majors spent a year telling engineers they needed to learn to code to stay relevant. Then, in about three months, that advice became obsolete. In this conversation, she talks about why engineers who built careers on beautiful, readable code are struggling more than anyone else, why junior developers might have a hidden advantage right now, and what it means that nobody has a headstart anymore. Everybody’s ignorance has been reset to 100. This season of Still Burning is brought to you in partnership with WorkOS and Augment Code.

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Nobody Knows

Kent Beck kicks off Still Burning with a fireside manifest for geeks navigating a world that's shifted under their feet. Old skills are losing leverage, and nobody has the answers — not even the people who've been doing this for 30 years. So what do you do? You try things. You experiment cheaply. You bless and release what no longer matters. This one's for the geeks who still care and are still doing something about it. This season is brought to you in partnership with WorkOS and Augment Code.

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