Host: Welcome everyone. It's it's it's so nice to see all of you. It's so nice to see lot lot of friendly faces. A lot a lot of you said hi and also just really good to to meet Martin and Kent. And I was joking a little bit beforehand that I did not expect Martin and Fowler and Kent Beck to walk into a place where it's all the kind of the hottest AI startups and all of them. But here we are. And we're here for a very, very good reason.

Kent Beck: What? What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Host: Oh. Oh gosh. Here we go. So Kent is going to hate me for this cuz today I already called him old furniture once.

Martin Fowler: I don't think that's fair.

Host: Old furniture. Yeah, you're the old guy in the crowd.

Host: I'm at least a year younger than him. Uh but we're I I I'm psyched that both of you are are here and a week ago me, Martin Kent, and a bunch of other people were in Deer Valley, Utah in the future of software engine conference that Martin pulled together some some very interesting thinkers and we were talking about like it was nice to reflect that 25 years ago the agile manifesto was created. There were 17 people and and two of you and you were two of you were there. Since then, you've really helped shape software engineering as you've helped influence and and you've had major contributions. Could I ask both of you to like recap what the feedback you've gotten over over these these years, these decades, what ideas really stuck with engineers? what what what do you hear a lot they tell you like thank you for this I'm using a lot of this

Martin Fowler: that's a really interesting question I haven't really reflected on that I mean a lot of people talk about things in general that we've worked on um whether it's agile broadly or refactoring particularly in my case because that was a book I worked on um but I don't know anything where any of the pieces of that necessarily

Kent Beck: so I Get thank you so much for test driven development. I also get this test test driven DEVELOPMENT ruined my life. My dog left me, my house burned down, and it's all your fault. So, I don't know. Does that answer your question?

Host: I I think TDD has has been very divisive. I I've been a I' I've been a convert at some point and then I I hated it. But it's interesting because I feel a lot of a lot of the are like this, right? They're meant to be provocative. They're meant to push you.

Kent Beck: Yeah. I also got uh was actually chatting with somebody uh yesterday who's really pushing the AI envelope. And his comment was, well, thank goodness for all of your pushing of TDD for the last 20 years because it's really important now we've got AI agents. And uh it it's interesting to hear that feedback because um I'm always suspicious of it cuz I want it to be true. You know, I'm the kind of guy who when when I hear something I like, I'm I'm kind of thinking, am I just making this up? But uh it does make sense to me that, you know, when we've got a big powerful genie, you really have to learn how to verify that it's doing the right thing for you,

Martin Fowler: which we've been practicing for 25 years.

Kent Beck: Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not a big powerful genie myself, but I still needed the tests to make sure I was doing the right thing.

Host: So, a lot a lot of folks here, they will know you from the podcast that we did together. They might have they probably read some of your books. Barton, you're really perfect writer, but can you tell us what are you up to these days? What does your day-to-day look like? How do you stay in touch with technology? I got a really rude comment that I'm still I got to fight into someone on LinkedIn about this. They said like, "Oh, your your conference like you're having authors here who are like out of touch with technology." And I'm like, "Do you even know who Martin Valer and Kemp Beck is?" But I just want wanted to to ask like these days, how what are what are you up to? Seriously?

Martin Fowler: Well, my I when I finished the second edition of Refactoring Book, which was, you know, five or six years ago, I toyed with the idea of writing another book. I've got several half-written books out there to work on, and I decided I should not do that. Instead, what I should do was work with people who are actually still doing real work on real projects, writing real code as it were. Um, and get them to get their ideas out and what they learn out. So, that's been my main project ever since, primarily focused on the martinfaller.com website because, hey, I control that. There's no big corporation that's going to sweep in and and clobber it. At least not without my um me selling out and getting lots of money out of it. Um

Martin Fowler: and um as the AI thing has come, I've been very keen to capture that. And what my big focus is on is trying to re understand details of people's workflow and what exactly they are doing. what are the kind of conversations they're having with the genie as as Kent um calls it and you know what if you're reviewing things what are you looking for if and particularly what decisions are you are we the humans still making and how is that decision flow changing um so that's my interest is it's not what I'm doing it's what my colleagues are doing and trying to spread that around and that's that's my focus

Kent Beck: and so I've been uh my personal mission in life is to help geeks feel safe in the world. And uh our people do not feel safe right now for some good reasons and some not good reasons. And one of the things I noticed is for 25 years we've kind of had the answers. Somebody comes to us and says we have too many bugs. Or like all right, well here's how you write tests. Oh, I can't write tests. Well, here's how you design so you can write tests and just kind of press play on the recorder. And the thing that's changed is at this moment nobody knows the answers to anything.

Kent Beck: And so what I've been trying to do is both for my own geeky curiosity satisfaction, let me go back into explore mode and find out as well as I can uh what you can do to be effective with these new tools and then demonstrate that to the next generation of people who've been used to getting answers. Oh, I'm having some trouble. let me look up in the book what the solution is that that worked for the last 20 years and it doesn't work for the last year and won't work for the an extended period. So, as seniors, I figure it be behooves us to demonstrate not just how to use these tools effectively, but how to figure out how to use these tools effectively because that's a whole different set of skills and you say all right we don't know what what will come how no one has to figure it out.

Host: I wanted to take you back into your professional journey. One thing that you share here you have seen a lot more than a lot of us myself included a lot of people in in the room as well. Do you remember a time where there was a technology change which looked similarly kind of unpredictable or scary like AI does right now? What was the thing that comes the closest in your career?

Martin Fowler: Well, nothing has hit with the magnitude of AI. That's I mean this is a a whole size difference from anything that we've faced before. um on a smaller scale um I would say and we were very much involved in the the growth of object-oriented languages I mean and that scared a lot of people it didn't scare us so much because we were part of it um I would say that the impact of the internet um had a huge impact upon us all um and of course obviously we were spreading the the the challenge of agile software development and that had a very big impact on a lot of organizations because you could tell by how hard they resisted it. Um, but the thing about AI is that you know all of these things we were talking about how important they were and how valuable were and trying to persuade people of the importance of them. Yes, even the internet that may sound surprising but there were people who would weren't thinking that was important. Um, but AI there's kind of no argument about how important it is. People can't I mean you cannot put blinkers on to deny the importance of this thing.

Kent Beck: So the the other analogy that I have is to the introduction of the microprocessor. Before that, computers were a big box. You couldn't move them around. If you wanted another one, you'd mortgage your house again. It was a it was a big it was a big deal. And I was a kid in Silicon Valley with my dad as a programmer when the Intel 404 hit and we went, "Wait a minute, that's a computer." Oh my goodness, the the possibilities suddenly expanded. If you can figure out how to write software, if you can figure out how to design hardware around this thing, you can suddenly do things we can't even imagine. And so, uh, I think part of AI is this expansion expansion of imagination. So, I'm writing projects that are ridiculously ambitious. I'm uh working on a persistent small talk. I I'm writing library quality code for Rust. I'm just, you know, anything I can imagine to trying to do, I'm going to try and do it and see. Now, a bunch of those fail and that's fine. That's part of this process. But um it it's not like this is the first time the heavens have opened and and we've been brought tons of new opportunities

Host: and back either with with object-oriented spreading or with microprocessors. Do you remember what the the feeling was in the industry and what was the difference between experienced professionals who you know just got thrived in this new world and ones who were just honestly left behind?

Martin Fowler: Yeah, there with all of those there was that sense of the mix between the the the people chasing the hype and the the people who were saying no this is nothing special. Um I think it you've always got to have that balance of skepticism and curiosity um in order to be able to do that and you are selective about it. I mean I have been completely skeptical about some big um changes. I mean um blockchain for instance I was extremely skeptical about that um and but as I like to say you know about about my skepticism about technologies which is well rooted because I've seen so much snake oil projected out by the industry um over the years my skepticism has to be absolute and total which means I have to be skeptical about my skepticism and that requires that curiosity and I think that's where the thing is you've got to be curious enough to say may this looks like but maybe it isn't. How do I probe in order to detect that there's signs of of something coming out there?

Kent Beck: Yeah. What what's the smallest experiment I can run to verify to my own satisfaction and everybody's level of satisfaction is going to be different whether or not this claim is true. That's that's the skill that has suddenly in the last year become a thousand times more valuable is that skill of saying what's the least I can do to validate for my to my own satisfaction whether this claim is true or not.

Martin Fowler: But there's also another step in there that you also got to be aware that your early interactions may not actually be a true signal. I mean, when I started playing around with AI, I guess it was the co-piloty like stuff about a year, year and a half ago, I was pretty unimpressed, right? I mean, I I set up I'm an Emacs guy. I set up Emacs. The one true editor. Um, I set it I set up Emacs so that I could just have it prompt and complete automatically because, you know, Emacs is capable of doing that. And I used it for maybe three or four days before I just got because sometimes it would give you something wonderful but most of the time it gave you such garbage that you would just control K right away. And if that had been my impression of AI and I have said that's what I think of AI, I would have just immediately flip the bozo switch on it just like I did with blockchain. But on the other hand, I'm also probing out there. So my my most valuable discovery in all of this is in the room next door Simon Willis's blog which I read and one of the things that I took from that was to use this tool well you have to learn how to use it well which was also something very true of object orientation people would say oh objects you know and I you look at what they were doing you're not using objects very well in fact we kind of mckent I were kind of at yeah they were using C++ and Java they didn't actually do the real stuff. Um, but the the point was you have to be also listening to the folks out there and being able to read with a critical eye and getting a sense of okay, if you do run across a Simon Willis, is he hyping everything wonderful or does he seem to be recognizing real problems at the same time and giving me straight stuff? And that I found was a really I mean when people give you that balance of good and bad and also most importantly are prepared to say I don't know then that that involves something to listen to. So him and also some of my colleagues in Fort Works like Mike Mason and Bit Berkel they really kind of showed me that oh I've shouldn't be relying too much on my initial reactions.

Kent Beck: Yeah and it can change week to week. I I'll I'll I'll I'll try something with Gemini one week fails miserably. This Gemini thing cloud code then that works pretty well and then it's doesn't work well and then I tried Gemini for the same thing and it works this week and it didn't work la last week. That's a you know people want the answer and the answer is changing. So you can't possibly in this environment have the answer. Now, that's the bad news. The good news is nobody else has the answer either. So, you're just as smart as everybody else because you're just as ignorant as everybody else.

Host: Is that reassuring?

Host: Is that reassuring? By a show of hands. One thing that struck me as like a bit of a similarity is back in 2001 when the almost exactly 25 years ago when the agile manifesto came out with that website with all the 17 names listed and Kent Beck being the first one. Why were we the first one?

Kent Beck: Alphabetical strictly alphabetical but it is a source of unending joy. You can very much take of that.

Host: That that that kicked off some really interesting things in the indust industry because what what my interpretation was like well use this agile here's these four pretty simple easy to understand and easy to identify with things to build better software faster cheaper higher quality you name it. Now, when I think of why so many companies are adopting AI, they're kind of expecting the same thing, better, faster, cheaper, and so on. And so, I wanted to can you reflect on how agile actually went? Speaking of snake oil,

Kent Beck: well, it it turns out that people don't want faster, cheaper, better.

Host: Tell me more.

Kent Beck: Inside a company, the incentives are so misaligned with actually achieving that. And so so as as geeks trying to achieve that and say, "Well, it's 40% better and it's 12% cheaper and it's less fattening." Uh people will punish you for that if that doesn't in align with their incentives inside of organizations. Yeah. In the ideal organization, everybody would care about the same things. And that's just not the way it works.

Kent Beck: But I

Kent Beck: so and and we haven't touched that problem. So if AI is coming along to promise the same things, we're going to see exactly the same reaction.

Host: And and this is what I I wanted to ask like looking back from what you've seen for agile now 25 years and it played out at a lot lot slow slower pace. What similarities do you see right now