Still Burning

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...

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...

Randy Shoup set out to be an international lawyer. He studied in West Berlin when there was still a wall around it, spent a year at Stanford Law, and had what should have been the perfect summer internship on Sand Hill Road. Instead he spent it watching inventors light up whiteboards with brilliant ideas — then being told his job was just to write them down. That summer broke something open. He we...

Michael Grinich has an unusual vantage point, his company powers enterprise infrastructure for hundreds of companies, so he sees how the AI transition is actually playing out across the industry, not just in the headlines. What he's noticing: the whole ecosystem is accelerating, not just the AI companies. And most people are misreading what kind of moment this is. Kent and Michael talk about build...

Angie Jones spent years as the "geek whisperer" — translating technical possibility into human progress. Then she led one of the most ambitious AI adoption programs in the industry, and the rug got pulled out. Now at the Agentic AI Foundation, she's working to make sure the standards powering the next era of software are built in the open, by everyone. Kent and Angie dig into the impossible bargai...

Amelia Wattenberger didn’t want to be a developer — both her parents were, and from the outside it looked boring. Then she accidentally built a website, and everything changed. In this conversation, she and Kent talk about why play matters more right now than productivity, what we actually lose when every project has a KPI attached, and why the most important skill in augmented development might j...

Charity Majors spent a year telling engineers they needed to learn to code to stay relevant. Then, in about three months, that advice became obsolete. In this conversation, she talks about why engineers who built careers on beautiful, readable code are struggling more than anyone else, why junior developers might have a hidden advantage right now, and what it means that nobody has a headstart anym...

Kent Beck kicks off Still Burning with a fireside manifest for geeks navigating a world that's shifted under their feet. Old skills are losing leverage, and nobody has the answers — not even the people who've been doing this for 30 years. So what do you do? You try things. You experiment cheaply. You bless and release what no longer matters. This one's for the geeks who still care and are still do...