Killing PRs was the easy part, now technical death keeps the CTO up
7 hours ago
- #AI in Software Development
- #Agile Methodology
- #Technical Debt
- Sander Hoogendoorn, with over 40 years of coding experience and as CTO at iBOOD, presented 'The Last Pull Request' at Devoxx, detailing his team's move away from traditional practices like scrum, sprints, and pull requests.
- The team replaced conventional methods with pair programming, mob programming, smaller and faster check-ins, and shared accountability, emphasizing that 'everyone on the team is an architect.'
- AI is integrated into daily work (currently using Claude), but Sander warns of risks like 'technical death,' where teams spend all time maintaining existing software, compounded by AI-generated code that isn't fully reviewed.
- He introduced 'selfware'—software built by non-developers using AI to solve their own problems, leading to unmanaged, untested code that poses compliance and security risks.
- Sander argues that AI doesn't change everything; it's the latest in a series of shifts (like cloud, microservices) that expand tooling and problem spaces, often into 'complex territory' with no best practices.
- He criticizes pull requests as slowing teams down and being unnecessary for cohesive teams, though useful in open source, and emphasizes automation for formatting and linting instead.
- Accountability is distributed in his team; they don't blame individuals for breaks but focus on fixing issues collectively, with everyone responsible for everything.
- Sander clarifies that he's not critical of Agile itself but of misunderstandings, like equating Agile with Scrum, and stresses the Agile Manifesto's core: 'uncovering better ways of developing software.'
- Looking ahead, he predicts that English will be too ambiguous for AI specifications, leading to new programming languages for more precise AI conversations, with programming continuing but with evolved tools.