A bonus edition by the fire: Kent talks with his oldest, Beth Andres-Beck — software engineer, one-time self-driving-car programmer, theater major, organizer, and now a candidate for Congress. They start with a cheese pun and end up somewhere serious: why people don't write tests and how you actually get a team to start, what it means that an AI agent has no endocrine system of its own, and who is accountable when "the computer" makes the call. Along the way, a car that solved a roadblock by driving up onto the sidewalk, an org-design trick called the Guild of Guilds, and a kindergartner who asked the most important question there is: how do you know that?

This season is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

Creators & Guests

• Alyssa Eidam - Producer
• Kent Beck - Host
• Beth Andres-Beck - Guest

Keith Adams has spent his career at the systems layer, with nine years at VMware, the founding of Facebook's HHVM team, and a run as chief architect at Slack. Now he backs frontier-tech founders at his firm Pebblebed. He and Kent sit by the fire to ask what happens when the twenty-year-old playbook for building software suddenly goes blank. They range across the economics of the shift, from Jevons paradox to software as "proof of work" to a future where the real moat is gigawatts of compute, before turning to what it costs us: the flow state that drew us to programming, now traded for something closer to air traffic control.

This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.

Jessica Kerr joins Kent by the fire to argue that AI didn't take the programmer's job, it split it in two. The part we loved, crafting code by hand, has been commoditized like IKEA furniture. What's left is harder and more human: understanding what to build, proving it works, and stewarding the living "symmathesy" of people, code, and agents all learning from each other. They get into accelerated learning, why play is a signal you're learning, the loop that "becomes a noose," and choosing excitement over fear while the ground keeps shifting. You can find more work from Jessica on her podcast, Machines of Code and Grace.

This season of Still Burning is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.