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• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.

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In this special “ask me anything” episode of Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I am in the hot seat facing questions sent in by subscribers that are read out by guest Volodymyr Giginiak, CTO and cofounder of Wordsmith AI, a legal tech startup (note: I’m an investor).

I tackle your questions on the software industry, AI, hiring, engineering organizations, career growth, the business model of the Pragmatic Engineer, and more. We also discuss where software engineering is headed, and I offer advice on some specific situations. Thanks to everyone who sent questions!

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro

01:56 From Uber to writing

09:22 AI-native SDLC

14:00 AI and hiring

19:06 Engineers currently thriving

22:18 Junior roles

24:44 Meta’s war mode

27:54 AI at Big Tech vs. startups

36:46 Tech debt

41:36 Types of engineering managers

44:40 Measuring AI productivity

48:30 The value of CS degrees

50:53 AI at Pragmatic Engineer

56:09 Future-proofing your career

1:01:36 The EU job market

1:03:55 Making money as a creator

1:08:20 What’s next for The Pragmatic Engineer

1:09:27 Bunq and Pollen

1:13:38 Spotting trends

1:14:33 Book updates

1:15:20 Favorite books & tech products

1:17:13 What won’t change in engineering

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• State of the software engineering job market in 2026

• The impact of AI on software engineers in 2026: key trends.

• How 10 tech companies choose the next generation of dev tools

• The reality of tech interviews

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Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.

Brought to You By:

• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages.

• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable.

• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready.

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Few have made as big an impact on software engineering as this week’s guest on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent Beck. He created Extreme Programming, pioneered test-driven development (TDD), co-created JUnit, and is one of the authors of the famous ‘Agile Manifesto’. But these days, he's re-examining many ideas for the age of AI, and says we’re failing to accumulate trust during this new era at the same high rate as new code is being accumulated.

In this episode of the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Kent and I dig into his journey from discovering Smalltalk in the early days of personal computing, to helping define modern software engineering practices. We explore the origins of TDD, design patterns, Extreme Programming, and Agile – along with some lessons learned at Apple and Facebook.

Kent explains why he believes software engineering is about far more than writing code, why no one yet knows exactly how engineers should work alongside AI agents, and how his "explore, expand, extract" framework can help engineers navigate major technology shifts.

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Timestamps

00:00 Intro

03:47 Human engineers aren’t going away

08:00 Kent's path into tech

13:50 Undergraduate and graduate studies

17:21 Kent’s first programming job

18:54 The rise and fall of Smalltalk

27:04 Working with Ward Cunningham

37:36 Design patterns

44:05 Working at Apple

51:08 CRC Cards

59:29 Testing tools in the language

1:04:22 The C3 project with Martin Fowler

1:09:54 Extreme Programming

1:16:25 Developing TDD

1:25:07 Writing the Agile Manifesto

1:30:00 Agile’s impact

1:32:40 Agile’s downside

1:37:32 The Dotcom Bust

1:44:30 Lessons from working at Facebook

1:59:44 Kent’s ‘Good to Great’ program at Facebook

2:06:07 Soft skills engineers need to learn

2:09:30 AI and the challenges of acceleration

2:15:53 Explore, expand, extract

2:22:33 What Kent is excited about

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey – co-written with Kent Beck

• TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck

• Paying down tech debt

• The past and future of modern backend practices

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Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@pragmaticengineer.com.