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Honest conversations about fear, uncertainty, and what it means to build things when the ground keeps shifting.
Season One is sponsored by WorkOS and Augment Code.
I'd like to thank Augment Code for sponsoring this first season of Still Burning. I can remember my excitement when I saw my first IDE. You could find anything, you could change any code, and I was just so excited. But the era of making changes code like a watchmaker, is gone. Most of the changes now are going to be made by the Genie.
Kent Beck:And augment code is helping go beyond the IDE with their new intent product. Programmers stay oriented, they keep learning, they see what's happened, they make strategic decisions, and meanwhile agents go and do the detailed work. The gap between an idea and a running system has never been narrower and that's exciting. The gap between a running system and a mature fully running system is the same as it ever was. And the difference is not feature set, the difference is trust.
Kent Beck:Security, auditability, identity, the list of items a CISO hands you before your system will run-in their system. Teams try to tackle this themselves. How hard could it be? It turns out that this is both a very important problem and a very complex problem. That's where WorkOS comes in.
Kent Beck:Single sign on, identity providers, role based access management. Work OS gives you the infrastructure to trust the systems that you're excited to have built. Angie Jones, we meet at last.
Angie Jones:Yes, yes. I am honored long time fan.
Kent Beck:Oh, thank you so much and the same back to you. We've kind of been in the same orbit but on opposite sides of the planet for a long time.
Angie Jones:Yeah, that's right.
Kent Beck:Well, welcome to Still Burning.
Angie Jones:Thank you.
Kent Beck:The theme is geeks who still care and are still doing something about it.
Angie Jones:Oh, nice.
Kent Beck:And I like the G. Pott Hill definition of a geek as someone who's highly technical, highly creative, and highly desirous of being both.
Angie Jones:Ah, I like that.
Kent Beck:So here we are in this time of great change.
Angie Jones:Yes.
Kent Beck:Usually we record in front of a fire pit, behind a fire pit, but we're here at a conference about IT leaders in the face of the AI revolution. Yes. And you gave a presentation yesterday that made me cry.
Angie Jones:Oh.
Kent Beck:You were talking about the unexpected consequences of AI. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Angie Jones:Yeah. I think that all of us are trying to figure this thing out. And that seems like the very responsible thing to do as leaders. Yes, we want to empower our people, we want to teach them how to use this new tool that's non deterministic to solve engineering challenges. And I made really good progress at doing that within a large engineering org.
Angie Jones:And once we got to, you know, the stage where, you know, everyone is running five, ten agents at a time, and we're automating all of this work and delegating tasks to the agents, the rug was pulled out and, you know, with those efficiencies, then came a large cut. And we see layoffs across the industry quite often these days.
Kent Beck:It's been going on for a couple of years.
Angie Jones:Yeah, this one was a 40% cut that was cited as AI rift. That left me with a question of, you know, what are we doing? Is this what we're aiming to do?
Kent Beck:Are we working ourselves out of a job?
Angie Jones:Yeah, yeah.
Kent Beck:And who benefits?
Angie Jones:Who benefits from that, you know?
Kent Beck:Yeah. So, yeah and I don't think there's an answer for it. It's not like we can stop this, but how do we do it responsibly? How do we reduce the harm? How do we maximize the ben not maximize, optimize the benefits and while we're reducing the harms.
Angie Jones:And
Kent Beck:I thought the presentation was a beautifully crafted presentation.
Angie Jones:Thank you.
Kent Beck:In that you built to this, you know, and here were the difficulties and you know, we overcame, blah blah blah, and then you drop the mic. Yeah. And, and ask those critical questions. Like, did we do this to ourselves?
Angie Jones:Right.
Kent Beck:Was there an alternative?
Angie Jones:Yeah. And I think we, we have to stop lying to ourselves about, you know, we tell folks, oh no, you have to do this. If you don't, you'll be left behind, which I mean, that's true. But also we give some false sense of you'll be safe if you do do this, right? And that has not been true in my case.
Kent Beck:Yeah, absolutely. So it's damned if you do and damned if
Angie Jones:you That's right.
Kent Beck:If you don't adopt these tools, then you'll be fired. And if you do adopt these tools, then you'll be fired. And nobody seems to be doing the math on that and saying, is a different bargain that we could offer?
Angie Jones:Yeah. And I'm curious about that because for years we have always said, every business I've ever been a part of has said, you know, if only we had more people, you know, we could do all of these amazing things.
Kent Beck:Right.
Angie Jones:And so now we're in a position where you don't necessarily need to hire more people but you can kind of maybe 5X, 10X the people that you have, why aren't we looking at, okay, now all of those things that we said we wanted to do, let's do them.
Kent Beck:Right.
Angie Jones:Yeah. Is that a possible outcome?
Kent Beck:Well, is the market going to sort this out? Are there going to be organizations that figure out that there are better uses for people than dropping their salaries? It seems like that's the assumption. The best use we have for people is eliminating their salary. Really, there's nothing else you could do with all of the passion, the experience, the connections, the social relations, that's the best thing you can think of to do is to stop spending money on them.
Kent Beck:Shifting gears a little bit, how did you first know that you were a geek?
Angie Jones:Oh wow, probably so I'm not one of those folks who grew up with you know a computer and learned to hack at an early age. I actually didn't find computer science until I was already in college, very unsure of what I wanted to do with my life. And my father, who was an accountant, said, hey, look, these computers are, you know, about to take off. You should learn how to use one. And me not knowing anything about computers, I just find the first class that has computer somewhere in the description.
Angie Jones:And that was a C plus plus course.
Kent Beck:Oh, I'm so sorry.
Angie Jones:But I, that was the best thing that happened to me and this was fascinating to me. I've always loved like solving puzzles and things like that so this felt very much like that. And so I did really well in that class and that's when I realized, you know, when, when class lets out and everyone is going on the yard and doing like fun college things and I'm running to the computer lab because I can't wait to do my programming assignment on my little floppy disk, you know? Yep. That's when I realized, okay, I might be a geek.
Kent Beck:Was that a, what was the trajectory of your life before that?
Angie Jones:Yeah. So, you know, it was basically, you know, your typical high school courses. I never knew what I wanted to do. I did not know computer programming was a thing. I didn't know anyone who did that sort of work.
Angie Jones:And so, you know, I always did well in the high school. Loved math and stuff like that. But that was never presented to me as an option. So it's like, you just don't know it exists until you do.
Kent Beck:So you came out of college. Did you end up with a CS degree?
Angie Jones:I did. So I got my bachelor's in computer science, went to work at IBM. And then while at IBM went on to get my master's in computer science as well. So big, big geek.
Kent Beck:Cool. And now after this accidentally working yourself out of a job, you've got a new position at a new organization. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Angie Jones:Yes, I'm really excited about this one. So this is, at the Agentic AI Foundation, which is a new foundation founded by Block, Anthropic, and OpenAI, as part of the Linux Foundation. And so this one focuses on, you know, key standards and primitives in the agentic AI space. And I think this is really important because we're seeing like a lot of innovation from companies everywhere and everyone is trying to solve the same problems at the same time, right? Yeah.
Angie Jones:And companies need some assurance of like, which one of these standards can I build on top of, right? Which ones will, will stick around? Which ones will, will not be locked in inside of one vendor? And so the Agenetic AI Foundation serves as like this neutral governance for key primitives like MCP, for example, AgentsMD, and there's like several other projects that I'm looking to bring into the foundation. But yeah, that's, that's what I'm working on now.
Angie Jones:I think of it as like the grown up job, where, you know, all of these labs are kind of fighting and racing.
Kent Beck:Messing around.
Angie Jones:Come on, let's sit at the table, everyone play nice for a few minutes and let's figure this stuff out.
Kent Beck:Got it, got it. So your job now is only partly technical and it's partly getting these people to work together. Do you carry a set of principles into that conversation?
Angie Jones:Yes. I think I've always advocated for developers. Yes.
Kent Beck:Yeah, I called you the geek whisperer.
Angie Jones:I'm the geek whisperer, right? And so my work prior to this in like enabling these developers, we had all the tools, we had everything. And so I know firsthand how difficult it is to build on top of this stuff, how to use it. So I bring that with me, the interoperability of it all, like I bring with me, like these are things that are at the forefront of my mind when having these types of conversations.
Kent Beck:Okay.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:And so there's a balance to be struck between specifying, locking some protocol down too early. Yes. And diminishing innovation or locking down stuff that just doesn't actually matter or isn't proven out.
Angie Jones:And
Kent Beck:you lock it up too late and now you've got VHS and beta. So how do you navigate, like do you have a gut sense of when the timing is? Do you have principals
Angie Jones:Yeah, to a great question. I just announced that we're now open for project submissions And the criteria that I specified is that it's mature, and you know, has adoption and
Kent Beck:mature in this area, meaning at least two weeks old.
Angie Jones:So, so that was the community's response. What do you mean mature? Nothing's mature right now, right? Like, what do you mean adoption and things like that? And so, you know, this is a really delicate balance where they are absolutely right.
Angie Jones:Like, all of this stuff is new. It might work today, who knows if it'll work tomorrow. And so there needs to be some sense of adoption, like some sense of interest that developers, companies, like people want this, they need it, they want to build on top of it. I think MCP is our poster child of that. Like, that's a very young protocol.
Angie Jones:Yes. And yet, you know, everyone, the community demanded, they are the ones that said, this is the one that we're going to go with. Right. And so that became obvious, right. And so that's kind of where we are right now.
Angie Jones:I mean, it'll change with the wind, if I'm being honest.
Kent Beck:Sure.
Angie Jones:But we do have a governing board, we have a tech committee who looks at these things and there's representation from all of the major companies. Agencik AI Foundation has 170 members right now. So that's all of the companies are there, all of the big ones, the small ones, like everyone who has a vested interest in this space is a part of the conversation. And so they'll decide.
Kent Beck:Okay. Is there a is there something that you find intriguing that's come out recently?
Angie Jones:I am the claw stuff is very intriguing. Oh,
Kent Beck:same, same. And also, I can't imagine it's it seems both so unsafe.
Angie Jones:Yes.
Kent Beck:But also, so have so much promise.
Angie Jones:Right. And this is another one where the community is saying, no, we're going this way, figure out the safety and the security and everything along the way, but this is where we're going, you know, and so I feel like we're almost in kind of a reactive mode with all of this stuff. Like everything is just like kind of exploding and then the grown ups have to run around and they kind of put the patches in place and the guardrails to help people not hurt themselves, you know. Agent skills is also one that I'm fascinated by, you know, you'll hear people minimize this as, oh, it's just a markdown file, but, you know, you can do some really powerful things with, this setup.
Kent Beck:Yeah, I'm interested in exploring that also.
Angie Jones:Yeah, yeah.
Kent Beck:So how are you specifying the standards? Do you have a set of tests? Do you have, I mean, we're talking, everybody's talking now about harnesses, which just sounds like a test suite to me, but apparently there's a lot more to it than that. So how do you specify, okay, here's what the protocol is?
Angie Jones:Yeah, we aren't the ones that specify that. Like another company or individual would be the ones that come up with that. Then we just house that for them once they figure out all the details.
Kent Beck:Okay, so MCP for example, Anthropic so could find they get to kind of say what's And in and what's
Angie Jones:they have a community, you know, that they utilize to help refine that spec and things like that. And so, and that's not just anthropic, that's multiple employees as well. So we kind of let folks, you know, do their thing, but it's also a part of this neutral home.
Kent Beck:Okay.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:So, back to Claude just for a second. Yeah. What do you want to build with it?
Angie Jones:I want to build everything with it. So this what's interesting is I I went from, you know, a mature company where processes and things were already in place and people and all of that, And now I'm at Authentic AI Foundation, which is brand new. So I'm like, woah, okay, before we hire anyone, or before I use any of like, the services that are already existing at Linux Foundation, I want to think about this from an AI first mindset and build this foundation AI natively. So I think I need some claws, you know, like, what do I need? Right?
Angie Jones:And so there's so many, like pretty much everything I want to at least try to see how much of this can I identify and then hire the people for the things I need the people for, you know?
Kent Beck:Okay, I always love that self description loop. Yeah. Because if you're using it in house, you have the shortest possible feedback loop.
Angie Jones:Yep.
Kent Beck:And we are at this stage where nobody knows what's this good for. You know, somebody poo poos skills. And you're like, well, maybe, but also maybe it would make a major difference.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:And you can't tell until you try it.
Angie Jones:That's right. And I don't like to talk from hypotheticals. This gives me the opportunity to dog food a lot of these standards. And then I can say for sure, like it works, you know? Or if it doesn't, now I have direct contact with the folks who are, you know, working on this so I can provide them with feedback as well.
Kent Beck:Got it. You have extraordinary abilities to communicate with geeks. Thank you. Where did that come from?
Angie Jones:Maybe I did some adjunct teaching, back in the day. And so, I taught, computer science classes, programming classes. And so I think a lot of my ability to like kind of teach and break things down comes from, you have a class of multiple people from different backgrounds and skill levels, and you need to break this down the least common denominator. So I credit a lot of that, with with my ability to communicate with folks now. How do we bring more people in this fold?
Angie Jones:Like, what what's happening to programming? Is there a space for junior developers? How do we get them to be senior developers? What does senior developer even mean in this new world?
Kent Beck:Yeah. So so this is a meeting. You've pushed one of my hot buttons. This is the Steve Yegi and the death of the junior developer. Yeah.
Kent Beck:I get I anyway, I disagree there. And he disagrees too.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:But it's just it's sad that the meme got out there.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:I get parents coming to me and say, oh, I have a junior in college and they have they're three years into a CS degree and now they're worried they'll never get a job. And they just think, you're a carpenter, you've just seen your first circular saw. And now you say, oh, but I yeah, no. Carpentry's over. Yeah.
Kent Beck:Because you don't have to saw by hand. And I just think, no. No. There's so many more things
Angie Jones:that
Kent Beck:you'll be able to address by writing programs than you've ever been able to do before. Yeah. Number one. Number two, you have the genie there as a resource. Me as a curious senior developer, I just love seeing something generated and going, well, what's that?
Kent Beck:What's the alternative? Why is this this way? If we were implementing in a different language, what would that look like? I can learn so much faster, and I think that's true of the juniors also. You never hire juniors because they're going to get a lot accomplished.
Kent Beck:Right. Every once in a while, have somebody who takes off like a rocket, that's fantastic. It's a great surprise. But that's not the bulk of the profit. The bulk of the profit is you have this call option on their future productivity.
Angie Jones:And
Kent Beck:every once in a while, companies get a narrow focus and say, well, we're going to train them and somebody else is going to benefit. Yeah, but the same is true of everybody else. As a community, we're all making a bunch of money in tech. And some of that needs to go to training the next generation.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:But I think they're more profitable now than ever because they're gonna ramp up faster.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:They're better with the tools than
Angie Jones:That's right.
Kent Beck:We are, so they're gonna teach us more than we're going to teach them, which is, I mean, it's uncomfortable on a
Angie Jones:It is uncomfortable. I actually launched this program at Block called AI Builder Fellowship.
Kent Beck:Okay.
Angie Jones:And so I brought in 10 engineers. Some had a design focus, but they could still utilize these agentic tools. And then some were like your hardcore, you know, software development, right? And my idea here was bring these folks in. They they don't have the same biases and, like, muscle memory that we have.
Kent Beck:Mhmm.
Angie Jones:Right? And they are native to these tools. This is how they have learned to build software. And I wanted to bring them in. I embedded them into teams to do real product work.
Angie Jones:And just as you said, the seasoned engineers were able to learn from them. Like if you see someone come in off the street, they have probably never worked at, you know, a place before, it is their first job. And all of a sudden, they're putting up more PRs than you are. That's really uncomfortable.
Kent Beck:Yeah.
Angie Jones:Right? And so two things, one is you'll either stop and become a bit more curious about how are they able to do this and hopefully learn something from it. Or two, you're gonna try to break their habit, right? And so yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's a two way street.
Angie Jones:You learn as well. So, yeah, your your genie is cranking out all of these PRs, but they're getting butchered in the in the core review process, right? And so they're able to learn how to use the genie effectively and what they should be looking for before they put the the PR up. And so that was a really interesting exercise. And even the way that I designed that that interview loop was much different than we do.
Angie Jones:I didn't ask your your leak code questions or anything like that. In fact, I said, bring your agent of choice, here's some money for tokens. And then that interview process was, hey, we gave like a fairly open ended, like build a learning tool of something that you would want to learn. And this gave us so much insight into how they prompt, how they, you know, engage with the agent, or they just taking the output blindly, or are they taking a moment to like, you know, look through it and verify it's on the right path? And it's okay, we told them it's okay if the genie messes up, that's, you know, that's fine.
Angie Jones:We expect that to happen. But how do you handle that, right? Are you completely lost or do you know how to rein that genie back in? And so, I thought that was a really good, it gave us like really good signals about, how effective they could be using these tools.
Kent Beck:And we spent so long with a relative, I mean, it seemed like it was a large body of knowledge, but now looking back, we've realized, okay, just how narrow that kind of standard software engineering was. And it's not a question of how much of that do you have coming in. It's a question of how much of that can you learn quickly? So curiosity is more important?
Angie Jones:Yes.
Kent Beck:Now? Yes. Yes. So how do you how do you encourage curiosity in a junior?
Angie Jones:I found that most of them, I don't know if everyone, but everyone we hire kind of came in with that curiosity. And maybe we filtered them out. So the application process was just submit things that you have built with these agent tools. So automatically we can see if like, you know, they are somewhat curious folks. But I think like naturally, given the tools that they have and how quickly they can go from zero to something, that just kind of brings out the curiosity in them.
Angie Jones:You know what I mean? Like, they want to know how much more I can do, how much more can I, what else could it do? You know? I don't know, I find that in myself as well. Like, Oh wow, it handled, I thought I wouldn't be able to do it.
Angie Jones:Handled that pretty easy. What else could I do? You know?
Kent Beck:Yeah. I I tend to think that curiosity is the natural state, and we pound it out of them. Whether it's through organization structure or don't spend so much on tokens.
Angie Jones:Something, right?
Kent Beck:Or or don't touch that part of the code or seems like a fantastic opportunity to help people nurture their own sense of curiosity.
Angie Jones:Yeah. And you know what else? The existing engineers, broader than engineering, but the existing folks already have a preconceived notion of what our product is and what it can do. And we did a orientation session with these junior builders and said like, hey, here's all the tools and everything. They had two days, we brought customers in where customers came and talked about like real pain points they have and things using our products.
Angie Jones:And these juniors built like fascinating features, you know, really big features for the customers in like a day or two with no previous knowledge of our code bases or systems. And that was eye opening to me, like how quickly they can come get onboarded to an existing code base and deliver value, like real value that the customers would be excited about.
Kent Beck:I love that process, especially the human connection part of that, which isn't necessarily easy for all geeks.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:But but it is a source of both energy and ideas. But it runs encouraging. It runs counter to current that I see in the AI world. Let's have smaller teams and smaller teams until we have one person sitting by themselves in little cave and now oh good now we don't have to communicate with anybody else.
Angie Jones:I definitely saw that. Slack messages became fewer. We no longer need meetings. And it had gotten to the point where I don't need to talk to anybody but my boss. I saw that, right?
Angie Jones:It's like, oh, we've given you connection to the data, the sales data, the customer, this, that, and the third. And so you no longer needed to like talk to people, which felt
Kent Beck:Well, feels like you don't need
Angie Jones:It felt like you didn't, like, in your mind, you didn't need to talk to people, right? And so that was really uncomfortable. And I haven't, like, poked into that much, but it was an observation.
Kent Beck:Yeah. And yet when you had these juniors talk directly to customers, magic happened.
Angie Jones:Exactly.
Kent Beck:So why don't we want that magic to happen?
Angie Jones:We should want that.
Kent Beck:And yet people are acting as if they want to minimize that. I predicted that team sizes would shrink. And now I'm predicting now that lots of people are down to two person or one person or half person teams, which is some separate issue, I'm predicting that team sizes are going to start to grow again.
Angie Jones:You think so?
Kent Beck:Yeah, we're going to see here's an aggregate of customers and here's eight, ten, 12 people with a diverse set of backgrounds ready to address this whole community.
Angie Jones:Oh, I like that.
Kent Beck:And I mean this is something that happened in extreme programming a long time ago where rather than having a dedicated programmer for one customer, You'd have a group of customers with differing needs, differing perspective, discipline priorities, and a group of programmers who are ready to move in any direction based on that aggregate demand that they got. It's more complicated to manage.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:You're going to have priority conflict and somebody's going to have to resolve that, But that was already there.
Angie Jones:Right.
Kent Beck:It's not like it created that setup doesn't create the conflict. It just surfaces it so somebody can resolve it. I'm hoping that will happen more. So if you had it to do over again at block, would you do it again?
Angie Jones:You know, Ken, I've been thinking about that a lot. I do think I would do it again. I wish I had more control over the outcome, but this was such exciting work. So empowering, you know, the engineers did incredible things and many of them said this was the most exciting time of their When
Kent Beck:it's going, it's the best.
Angie Jones:You know? And so, the good part about it all is most of those folks were able to land pretty easily, after it, like everyone is seeking this sort of engineer who, you know, knows how to utilize these tools.
Kent Beck:Is there anything that you would change about it? I
Angie Jones:can't think of what I would change, other than the outcome, which I didn't have control over. But, you know, the engineers, the skills that they learned were very beneficial. In fact, most of them were able to land somewhere pretty quickly after the exit. And they, most of them told me this was the most exciting time of their careers. And so I don't have regrets in how we went about it.
Angie Jones:Of course, I hate the outcome of that. But I also ask myself, like, was that just inevitable?
Kent Beck:So, a kind of advice that would come out of it for me is if you're the geek in this situation and you're learning augmented software development, be public about what you learn. Have a blog.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:So that's what's going to help you retain value even if the outcome is, you end up working yourself out of a job.
Angie Jones:Yeah, I think that's very true. And also as, I mean, as a community, we're all trying to figure this stuff out. So you're helping yourself, but you're also helping out an entire field, you
Kent Beck:know? Yeah, yeah. It's this nobody knows.
Angie Jones:No one knows.
Kent Beck:And if somebody discovers something, like there are people talking very loudly about, I've got this figured out now.
Angie Jones:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kent Beck:And I always preface that with today, given my limited exposure, no understanding of the long term consequences, and based on technology that's certain to change, what you should do is this. I mean, that's all I know.
Angie Jones:Right. Yeah.
Kent Beck:And that's all anybody can honestly say right now.
Angie Jones:Yep, that's so true.
Kent Beck:Okay, what is the conversation that you'd like to have with, we won't pick on one particular person, we both know who we're talking about. What's the conversation that you'd like to have with somebody in that position of resource allocation, let's call it that, before, during, and after the kind of program that you described?
Angie Jones:Okay, I think, definitely given our new superpowers, there needs to be some changes, right? And probably the team structure that's in place doesn't make sense anymore, right? And so maybe we start thinking.
Kent Beck:What about the treatment? If I go to the org chart, does the red pen, how far up does the red pen go?
Angie Jones:Good question. I would say probably your product development teams, right? Okay. Okay. So if you have, I don't know, 20 folks on a given team solving, you know, they're focused on a domain, Maybe you shift that around.
Kent Beck:Okay.
Angie Jones:As we talked about earlier, so many problems to solve. There's so many innovative things that we could be doing. So what if we kind of shuffle this a bit to your idea about, okay, we have this set of customers, right? What if we had smaller teams focused here, but we're now able to scale this, you know, in ways that we haven't been able to do before. I think there's something there that we could do without cutting, you know, so drastically, you know?
Kent Beck:Yeah, I keep hoping that people will focus on increasing the growth rate of an organization, of the business, the scope of the business, the scale of the business, and that urge to just reduce costs seems to be overwhelming at the moment. The conversation I'd like to have is to call out that temptation before we start.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:You're gonna see engineers doing way more than they used to do. And I want you to start thinking today about what you would do if you suddenly had more engineers.
Angie Jones:Yeah.
Kent Beck:We've been crying about this.
Angie Jones:Right?
Kent Beck:There's not enough engineers to do everything we want. Okay. Wishes granted. Oh, just kidding. We didn't really mean it.
Kent Beck:I think the, like how do you tell an executive how the sort of program you're talking about, how it's going? Because there's going to be some positive signals and there'll be some negative signals. You might lose some people, might, you'll certainly hear, this is a waste of time, this isn't worth doing. So how do you have that conversation, that midterm conversation with an executive?
Angie Jones:Yeah, I'll tell you, like, they definitely do not want to hear the gripes. But they're focused very much so on the impossible scenarios that have now become possible, right? And so I honed in there on like the amazing things that team did. Look at this team, they're now doing this. Look at that team, they were able to do that, right?
Angie Jones:And that went really well. But yeah, I think to your point, get a wish list, maybe early, start that before you even start, what are all of the amazing, impossible things that I would love for us to be able to do if we automatically had like, I don't know, know, we doubled our engineering headcount. What would you want to come out of that? And then aim for that, right? Aim for that.
Angie Jones:I think, I think that the problem is you didn't think about that. And so now you don't have a wish list and now you're like, okay, we can get done the work that we were already doing.
Kent Beck:Yeah.
Angie Jones:Maybe with less people, but is that growth?
Kent Beck:Right. Right. Okay, closing question.
Angie Jones:All right.
Kent Beck:What scares you about this?
Angie Jones:Everything. Everything scares me about it. I like beyond just one job or one company, like looking at the industry as a whole, the world as a whole, I've spent some time, you know, some hours kind of laying on the floor, looking at the ceiling, like where are we headed as a society, right? And what happens if, like, the work that humans have been doing, is no longer no longer a human job? What happens to society?
Angie Jones:And so that's a really scary thought. I can't stay there too long. But I circle back on it often and I don't have any answers. I told my genie, one of those times I was laying on the floor, I picked up my phone, I'm like, don't bullshit me. Where's this all?
Angie Jones:What are the humans going to do? And this was the one time it did not say, oh, no, we'll always need humans. He really did and both he was like, they don't know. They don't know.
Kent Beck:What a what a perfect place to end. Angie, what a pleasure getting to know you a little bit. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next with the foundation.
Kent Beck:And, with that, we're still burning.
Angie Jones:Thanks so much.