Top all-time · #915
Kent Beck
Personal blog · tidyfirst.substack.comprogrammingcareerproductivity
Kent Beck writes Software Design: Tidy First?, a personal blog at tidyfirst.substack.com about programming, career and productivity. Since 2022, 71 different Hacker News readers have linked it 195 times, most often “Canon TDD”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kent Beck's Substack for his writing on test-driven development (Canon TDD), eventual business consistency, and AI-assisted coding. Commenters call several posts good reads.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called "a really good read" and "really like" for reframing temporal data; one commenter urged reading Canon TDD as a short alternative to a book; the newslette
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software design is an exercise in human relationships. So are all the other techniques we use to develop software. How can we geeks get better at technique as one way of getting better at relationships? Click to read "Software Design: Tidy First?", by Kent Beck, a Substack publication with hundreds
Most-linked posts?
- Canon TDD8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-12-11
- The Bet on Juniors Just Got Better6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-12-13
- Eventual Business Consistency4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-08-04
- Slow deployment causes meetings (2015)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-10-04
- TDD Outcomes4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-11-19
- 90% of My Skills Are Now Worth $04 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-04-19
- The Impossibility of Making an Elite Engineer (2017)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-15
- Tokens: The New Oil – By Kent Beck4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-07-19
- The Documentation Tradeoff3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-06-12
- Why Does Development Slow?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-11-19
What Hacker News says?
Time to actually read Test-Driven Development By Example, my friend. Or if you can't stomach reading a whole book, read this: https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd TL;DR - If you're writing more than one failing test at a time, you are not doing Test-Driven Development.
Comment linking /p/canon-tdd
on “Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code”Submitted Start presentations on the second slide as a story · 455 points
HN discussionRelevant post by Kent Beck from 12th Dec 2025: The Bet On Juniors Just Got Better https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got... > The juniors working this way compress their ramp dramatically. Tasks that used to take days take hours. Not because the AI does the work, but because the AI collapses the search space. Instead of spending three hours figuring out which API to use, they spend twenty minut…
Comment linking /p/the-bet-on-juniors-just-got-better
on “AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'”Submitted Mastering Programming (2016) as a story · 284 points
HN discussion> Software engineering has got - in my opinion, often needlessly - complicated, with people rushing to very labour intensive patterns such as TDD, microservices, super complex React frontends and Kubernetes. TDD as defined by Kent Beck ( https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd ) doesn't belong in that list. Beck's TDD is a way to order work you'd do anyway: slice the requirement, automate checks to confirm behavi…
Comment linking /p/canon-tdd
on “Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?”Submitted Sales happen when buyers fear missing out as a story · 251 points
HN discussionSee also "Eventual Business Consistency"[0] by Kent Beck. Really good read. > Double-dated data —we tag each bit of business data with 2 dates: > * The date on which the data changed out in the real world, the effective date. > * The date on which the system found out about the change, the posting date. > Using effective & posting dates together we can record all the strange twists & turns of feeding data into a sys…
Comment linking /p/eventual-business-consistency
on “Reverse geocoding is hard”Submitted Software design gets worse before it gets better as a story · 233 points
HN discussion> that lets you query through time (also called "Bitemporal modeling" with fancier words) Datomic is actually only 'uni-temporal', it provides a database-wide, immutable "system time" (aka "transaction time") versioning + very effective as-of querying. This naturally falls out of the "Epochal Time Model" (see Deconstructing the Database, 2012). However there is no particular built-in support for any further mutable…
Comment linking /p/eventual-business-consistency
on “Insights after 11 years with Datomic [video]”Submitted Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life as a story · 212 points
HN discussionKent is an amazing guy! Met him a year+ ago at a friend's house and was fantastic to discuss the initial idea he had around this book, which was based on tons of experience at various engineering firms. He has been posting parts of chapters or thoughts in his newsletter for a while now - so it's awesome to see it compiled in one place! Newsletter if anyone wants to subscribe https://tidyfirst.substack.com/
Comment linking /
on “Tidy First?”Submitted Slow deployment causes meetings (2015) as a story · 188 points
HN discussionMaybe you're right. Obviously, if this advice helps people, then I should just back off. It's true that removing code is better than adding it, and that code is a liability. And I admit that I needed to hear that early in my career. But the article acknowledges that "over-adherence to [that] dogma can be counter productive". Great--so how can I tell if I've gone too far? How do I know if I should write more code or…
Comment linking /p/mastering-programming
on “Write Dumb Code (2018)”Submitted Programming Deflation as a story · 115 points
HN discussion"Coding in the Debugger" KENT BECK 2007 https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/coding-in-the-debugger
Comment linking /p/coding-in-the-debugger
on “Why don't schools teach debugging, or, more fundamentally, fundamentals?”Submitted Me an' Algernon – grappling with (temporary) cognitive decline as a story · 102 points
HN discussionAka 'bitemporal' - https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/eventual-business-consisten...
Comment linking /p/eventual-business-consistency
on “Event Sourcing, CQRS and Micro Services: Real FinTech Example”Submitted Complain and Propose (2014) as a story · 90 points
HN discussionInterestingly Kent Beck (the originator of Extreme Programming) has been doing a lot with AI coding and figuring out how it could be useful: https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/augmented-coding-beyond-the... I remember he first posted 2+ years ago, back when people first realized ChatGPT might be useful for coding, that "90% of my skills are now worthless and the remaining 10% are worth 1000x" https://tidyfirst.substac…
Comment linking /p/90-of-my-skills-are-now-worth-0
on “Should we revisit Extreme Programming in the age of AI?”Submitted The Founder Mode Tradeoff – By Kent Beck as a story · 77 points
HN discussionIt's not that simple though. His own article "Canon TDD" [0] still involves writing a test before writing the corresponding code. In my experience, the practicalities of all but the most far-removed integration tests (i.e. when receiving this request, server ultimately returns this response) mean that I would be effectively doubling my workload by having to repeatedly refactor two sets of code as I explore. The TDD…
Comment linking /p/canon-tdd
on “Explorative Programming”Submitted Product management is hosting a party, not playing chess as a story · 57 points
HN discussionhttps://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/canon-tdd isn't particularly new; Beck has been consistent about "write tests before the code, one test at a time" for about 25 years now. Same idea, different spelling: do you really think TDD should get credit for your good results, when you aren't actually shackling yourself to the practices that the thought leaders in that community promote?
Comment linking /p/canon-tdd
on “Verification-First Development”Submitted The Pleasure of Pattern as a story · 45 points
HN discussionThe first comment to the post referenced Kent Beck's: > "The value of 90% of my skills just dropped to $0. The leverage for the remaining 10% went up 1000x. I need to recalibrate" [0] At the time that felt like an exaggeration, but from my own use of Claude Code over the last month, I now entirely agree. My take on this is that we need to educate future devs from the very start as engineering managers - to be concer…
Comment linking /p/90-of-my-skills-are-now-worth-0
on “Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready”Submitted Design Is an Island – By Kent Beck as a story · 33 points
HN discussionMy general advice is to be aware when you're in the grief cycle and get out of there as fast as possible so that you can think clearly. A lot of people in the comments are in denial and bargaining. You sound like you're at depression... almost out of it! But things will continue to happen. Some people take years to get out of denial or anger. In this period, they do really dumb things. Things will get worse. Which c…
Comment linking /p/90-of-my-skills-are-now-worth-0
on “Ask HN: I feel pessimistic about the future – advice?”Submitted Anatomy of Oscillation as a story · 26 points
HN discussionI mean I think it's fair to assume that TEST-Driven-Development has something to do with testing. That being said, Kent Beck recently ( https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/tdd-outcomes ) raised a point saying TDD doesn't have to be just an X technique, which I wholeheartedly agree with.
Comment linking /p/tdd-outcomes
on “The Big TDD Misunderstanding”Submitted The Impossibility of Making an Elite Engineer (2017) as a story · 20 points
HN discussion
