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Still Burning

Kent Beck 6 Episodes Jul 22, 2026

Honest conversations about fear, uncertainty, and what it means to build things when the ground keeps shifting. Season One is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

Episodes

How Do You Know That? Jul 22, 2026 2361 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, a

Air Traffic Control Jul 1, 2026 3777 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, fr

A Learning System Made of Learning Parts Jun 17, 2026 2822 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 acc

You Don't Get to Create Anything Jun 3, 2026 2615 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 op

Itchy Brain May 20, 2026 2821 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 abo

Did We Do This to Ourselves? May 6, 2026 2462 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 impossib

Find the North Star Apr 22, 2026 2948 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 developmen

Run Out to Meet It Apr 8, 2026 3089 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 heads

Nobody Knows Mar 25, 2026 2633 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 Burning

Episodes

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