Today's guest is Benedikt Stemmildt, founder of hackers&wizards and co-chair of the CodeTalks conference. With more than 15 years in software, Benedikt now spends most of his time helping companies and product teams adopt agentic engineering, from training to full transformation.

We talked about why product and engineering roles are merging, why engineers resist AI the most, where the time you save with agents should actually go, and why Benedikt is not a fan of spec-driven development.

(00:00) Spec-driven is waterfall again

(01:07) When product and engineering merge

(03:53) Sponsor break

(07:01) Why engineers resist the most

(19:29) Where 80% of the tokens go

(24:08) A factory is just automation

(34:10) Few skills, many agents

(41:02) Stop reviewing every line

(45:16) Weaponize your skepticism

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Today's episode is brought to you by TRM Labs.

Criminals are scaling with AI. Build the technology that helps crimefighters fight back.

TRM is hiring, go to https://www.trmlabs.com/careers

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You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

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For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Francisco Trindade, VP of Engineering, founder of two companies, and author of Leading Effective Software Teams.

In this chat you will learn how to think about your team as a system, how to optimize flow in the developer process, and why you should absolutely hire junior engineers.

(00:00) Code reviews were always the bottleneck

(01:09) Introducing Francisco Trindade

(01:46) The team that wasn't broken

(05:13) Sponsor break

(07:00) Fix the system, not the people

(18:49) Stop optimizing for busy

(22:40) What great teams actually measure

(32:13) Autonomy is not a to-do list

(46:43) The kids are all right

(52:05) The trouble with all-senior teams

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Today's episode is brought to you by Notion.

Learn more about Notion’s Developer Platform today at https://ntn.so/refactoring

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Show notes:

• Francisco's book: https://franciscotrindade.me/leading-effective-software-teams-book

• Francisco's Website: https://franciscotrindade.me

–

You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

—

For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club

Today's guest is Adam Tornhill, founder of CodeScene, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene, and one of the very few repeat guests of the show.

With Adam, we talked about how his team refactored the whole Street Fighter 3 code base, which is more than 300,000 lines of code in just a few days and spending a few thousand dollars in tokens, and measured how that led to better and cheaper AI development of new features.

And then we discussed how the CodeScene team does agentic development, what the process looks like, what the bottlenecks are, and what are the crucial parts that Adam believes we still need to do as humans.

(00:00) Episode start

(03:38) Introducing Adam Tornhill

(04:12) Refactoring 300K lines of Street Fighter with AI

(09:50) The refactoring playbook: AI-invented patterns

(21:41) Generalizing the approach to enterprise code bases

(27:12) Why documentation of the "why" matters more than ever

(32:25) CodeScene goes fully agentic: the MCP rewrite story

(38:54) The development process: uncertainty drives rigor

(47:51) Validation is the new bottleneck

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Show notes:

StreetFighter case study:

https://codescene.com/blog/case-study-refactoring-at-scale-with-agents

One of Adam's blog posts about coding processes:

https://adamtornhill.substack.com/p/controlling-the-uncertainty-machine

MCP-guided Claude vs. unguided Claude experiment on refactoring tasks (Code health-guided MCP did 2-5x more code health improvements):

https://codescene.com/blog/making-legacy-code-ai-ready-benchmarks-on-agentic-refactoring

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Today's episode is brought to you by Notion.

Learn more about Notion’s Developer Platform today at https://ntn.so/refactoring

-

You can also find this at:

• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm

• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw

• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305

—

For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: luca@refactoring.club