What motivates @KentBeck after 40+ years in software? Veteran creator of TDD, XP, JUnit and co-author of the Agile Manifesto, on what drives him to keep going: #1# - He’s not afraid to start new things “If there's a secret sauce to what I'm doing, it's not being afraid to start over. Look on my GitHub, you'll see project 1, project 2, project 3 and so on. I'll push it a certain amount, and then “the genie” runs itself out of options. It can't make further forward progress, and so I'll wipe it away. Start over. I won't try and tweak it." #2# - Coding with the AI “Genie” has brought back Kent’s creative impulse "That creative impulse is what's come back to me with 'the genie'. I can go, I wonder what a B+ tree looks like - and go, oh, here's an alternative, this adaptive radix tree. What does that look like? I can find out. I sit down with the genie, I work it out, and then there's this artifact that wasn't there before. That's there now because of my imagination and my work. I had gotten fed up with the stupid minutiae of programming." #3# - Kent has FORTY years worth of ideas to build out: “I've got 40 years worth of ideas that suddenly are back in play and I'm having so much fun making things that are real.”

How can you a product that is 10x cheaper or 10x faster than what is already out there? @Sirupsen (cofounder and CEO at turbopuffer) used "napkin math" - doing quick calculations to get rough answers - to get here. Full interview from AIE: Deepdive in The Pragmatic Engineer:

“Ward Cunningham didn't let me touch the keyboard for a while”. @KentBeck, industry veteran and creator of XP & TDD, on learning to code with a master programmer: “Ward was always a much better programmer than I was in terms of low level technique. He also had a gift for design at a higher level and a gift, as you see in the wiki, of picking powerful top level goals and then making something that does that. But I was this 24-year-old punk with attitude and he didn't let me touch the keyboard for a while. I could watch him. Eventually I was like, those parentheses don't balance. You need a period here. And I was actually being useful to him. I was absorbing watching a master programmer at work, but I wasn't really driving stuff. I started understanding the low level patterns and then building up to the next level and the next, and then I would say, well, why is this called this and not that? We'd pull out a thesaurus and look it up and find just the right word for things and then continue. And I started making suggestions that he wouldn't understand right away. So I would take the keyboard for a little while, say, lay something like this. He’d say, ‘Oh, I get it. I get it’. And then he'd take the keyboard back. Over the course of a few months, we developed both a programming style where the keyboard was going back and forth where we were talking at multiple levels.”