Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
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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Brought to you by:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages antithesis.com/pragmatic
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable turbopuffer.com/pragmatic
• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready workos.com
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*The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:*
• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey – co-written with Kent Beck newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity
• TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-agents-and-coding-with-kent
• Paying down tech debt newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/paying-down-tech-debt
• The past and future of modern backend practices newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices
—
*Where to find Kent Beck:*
• X: https://x.com/kentbeck
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kentbeck
• Website: kentbeck.com
• GitHub: github.com/kentbeck
• Newsletter: tidyfirst.substack.com
—
*In this episode, we cover:*
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
—
See the transcript and other references from the episode at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast
—
Production and marketing by penname.co/.
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.
—
Brought to you by:
• Antithesis – verify your system’s correctness without human review or traditional integration tests – and avoid bugs or outages antithesis.com/pragmatic
• turbopuffer – a vector and full-text search engine built on object storage. It’s fast, cheap, and extremely scalable turbopuffer.com/pragmatic
• WorkOS – everything you need to make your app enterprise ready workos.com
—
*The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:*
• Measuring developer productivity? A response to McKinsey – co-written with Kent Beck newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/measuring-developer-productivity
• TDD, AI agents and coding with Kent Beck newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/tdd-ai-agents-and-coding-with-kent
• Paying down tech debt newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/paying-down-tech-debt
• The past and future of modern backend practices newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-past-and-future-of-backend-practices
—
*Where to find Kent Beck:*
• X: https://x.com/kentbeck
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kentbeck
• Website: kentbeck.com
• GitHub: github.com/kentbeck
• Newsletter: tidyfirst.substack.com
—
*In this episode, we cover:*
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
—
See the transcript and other references from the episode at newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/podcast
—
Production and marketing by penname.co/.
