YOUTUBE G6uBAwVrxHw Kent Beck and Luca Rossi talk about agile vs power structures, the return to waterfall, xp, tdd, feedback loops, reviews, stacked diff, and AI for writing and engineering.
Kent on AI
Kent says now that AI is here 90% of his skills are obsolete, but the remaining 10% have 1000x more leverage. This means you need to adapt to discover what is valuable vs what has become cheep.
An experiment Kent tried was to write an executive briefing and save time for someone non technical to get a sense of the value of tidy first. This would be good for engineers who are getting pushback from executives and customers.
Kent has built a bot he refers to as Rent-a-Kent and tasked it with drafting this as a chapter. The instructions had to be very clear.
Prompt: Take someone with this understanding, and at the end of the chapter they will have this new understanding. Use analogies, specifically this analogy. Build from these bullet points which you have to hit. By the end of the chapter, there's a hook to the next chapter on this topic.
This is writing, not word by word but goal by goal which is a good process which made explicit. There will be a lot of words, but these are ChatGPT word without the voice of the author and loaded with mistakes. So you need to spend more time editing to fix that.
By the end there's an executive briefing with surprising moments and analogies. The speed of building that material is faster than facing the blank page. ChatGPT writing is just bad enough to build the emotional energy to go in and say "no, that's not the point".
Writing skills less leveraged, but ability to outline 8 chapters, order them, and discuss hooks between them is much higher leverage. The limiting factor is topics, but Kent could build these on a weekly cadence using this approach.