Uploaded April 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Have you heard about anchoring? It's a cognitive bias, a shortcut our brain uses. In software engineering it's seen when we unreasonably prefer the first proposal we hear over all later proposals. No matter how much better the later proposals are.

If I give you a task and also a solution that worked on a similar task in the past, you will try to bend that solution to also work on the new task. Even though research has experimentally shown we write fewer bugs if we start from scratch.

As developers we like to think of ourselves as highly mathematical beings, highly precise and logical.

But the human brain isn't really as logical as it has been painted out to be. The brain takes lots of shortcuts and it's not at all transparent about it.

This talk is exposing ways in which cognitive biases creep into our work, cause bugs and rollbacks, and how to fight back.