How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry

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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