The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Codemanship's Blog

codemanship.wordpress.com

Musings And Mutterings By Jason Gorman

Software / engineering practiceTesting / QAAI / ML

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
290 from 18 Aug 2019 to 18 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (122 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://codemanship.wordpress.com/feed/

2026 90

  1. The Secret To Long-Horizon Agent Autonomy? Silent Failing
  2. Revisiting the Dependable Dependencies Principle
  3. Why Almost Nothing You Read Online About AI Is True
  4. Deterministic When Possible. Probabilistic When Necessary. Human When Cheaper.
  5. The Agentic Sweet Spot? The Human IS The Loop
  6. Human vs. Agent Reliability Over Long Horizons – How Can We Do What They Can’t?
  7. Out-Of-Distribution Errors – What Might Be Lurking In The Long Tail?
  8. Out-Of-Distribution Checks – How Human Intelligence Stabilises Agentic Workflows
  9. The Development Team Was Never The Typing Pool
  10. The Ultimate Equation about AI Coding
  11. On The Imaginary Trade-Off Between Agility & Rigour
  12. The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy
  13. Agentic Horizons – When The Wheels Start To Wobble…
  14. Anthropic May Know A Lot About Dice, But Do They Understand The Game?
  15. Less Is More
  16. Place Your Bets!
  17. AI Software Development – What Does The Data Say?
  18. Do Your Quality Gates See The Brown M&Ms In The Bowl?
  19. The Power Of “Why?”
  20. Feedback Latency, Learning & “Productivity”
  21. Even If We Could Extend The Horizons of Autonomous Coding Agents, Does That Mean We Should?
  22. The Solution To BDUF Isn’t Faster BDUF
  23. Return of the Revenge of the Son of Software Process Engineering
  24. A Car Crash In Slow Motion
  25. Feedback With A Face
  26. Faster Feedback -> Better Outcomes
  27. Feedbackmaxxing
  28. What If The Real Key To AI Coding Is Old-Fashioned & Boring?
  29. In Teams, Individual Productivity Is A Harmful Illusion
  30. Public Code Craft Training – July 7-9
  31. Extending The Horizon Of Agent Autonomy Is A Testing Problem
  32. I Am Ralph – CRESS Principles in Practice
  33. Calibrating Your Steps – How Small is “Small”?
  34. CRESS Principles for Context Engineering – S is for Specific
  35. Slow. The. F**k. Down.
  36. CRESS Principles for Context Engineering – S is for Small
  37. CRESS Principles for Context Engineering – E is for Empirical
  38. CRESS Principles for Context Engineering – R is for Refutable
  39. May Workshops for Self-Funding Learners – Update
  40. CRESS Principles for Context Engineering – C is for Current
  41. C.R.E.S.S. Principles for Context Engineering
  42. Is It Time To Get Back To Fundamentals?
  43. The Hottest AI Coding Skill In 2026? Coding Without AI
  44. Essential Code Craft – Workshops In May
  45. Have We Lost Sight Of Our Patients & Their Problems?
  46. Essential Code Craft – The Roadmap
  47. Specification By Example Was Essential Before AI. It’s Twice As Essential Now.
  48. The Mythical Agent-Month
  49. The AI-Ready Software Developer #24 – Specification Is A Conversation
  50. The AI-Ready Software Developer #23 – Speaking Clearly
  51. The Mouse That Roared
  52. Essential Code Craft – Test-Driven Development – April 7 & 11
  53. The AI-Ready Software Developer #22 – Test Your Tests
  54. Engineering Leaders: Your AI Adoption Doesn’t Start With AI
  55. The AI-Ready Software Developer #21 – Stuck In A “Doom Loop”? Drop A Gear
  56. A New DORA Performance Level – Catastrophically Bad
  57. Yeah, About Your CLAUDE.md file…
  58. Is AI Killing Software Engineering Jobs?
  59. The Double-Edged Sword of Automation
  60. How Can We Progress Past “AI” Woo?
  61. What Makes AI Agents Particularly Dangerous Is “Silent Failure”
  62. 71% of Developers and Engineering Leaders Believe “AI” Makes Engineering Discipline More Important
  63. Super-Mediocrity
  64. Will You Finally Address Your Development Bottlenecks In 2026?
  65. Rely On AI And Get Left Behind
  66. 100% Autonomous “Agentic” Coding Is A Fool’s Errand
  67. Best Way To Keep A Secret In Software Development? Document It
  68. Why LLMs Will Always Need An Expert In The Loop
  69. An Ode To “It Can’t Be Done”
  70. The Agile Manifesto at 25 – The Most Talked-About Unread Document In Software
  71. “TDD Slows Me Down”. Good.
  72. Tech Leaders: Low-Performing Teams Are A Gift, Not A Curse
  73. Am I Anti-AI? No. I’m Anti-Harm.
  74. Coding Is When We’re Least Productive
  75. Writing Code May Be Dead (Not Really), But Reading Code Will Live On
  76. Ready, Fire, Aim!
  77. Thanks to AI, Your Waterfall Is Showing
  78. Finally! Proof That Agentic AI Scales (For Creating Broken Software)
  79. Productivity Theatre
  80. The Gorman Paradox – Solution II: They’re In The Bin
  81. “First, We Model The Domain…”
  82. Yeah, About Your “Precise” Specification…
  83. Clean Contexts
  84. The Great Filter (Or Why High Performance Still Eludes Most Dev Teams, Even With AI)
  85. Yes, Maintainability Still Matters in “AI”-assisted Coding
  86. Walking Skeletons, Delivery Pipelines & DevOps Drills
  87. Why Does Test-Driven Development Work So Well In “AI”-assisted Programming?
  88. The AI-Ready Software Developer: Conclusion – Same Game, Different Dice
  89. The AI-Ready Software Developer #20 – It’s The Bottlenecks, Stupid!
  90. The AI-Ready Software Developer #19 – Prompt-and-Fix

2025 99

  1. The AI-Ready Software Developer #18 – “Productivity”. You Keep Using That Word.
  2. Aligning Teams Around Shared Goals (Is A Very Good Idea)
  3. Are You Training Your Junior Developers, Or Hazing Them?
  4. Refactoring Is Like Chess
  5. The Gorman Paradox: An Explanation?
  6. The Gorman Paradox: Where Are All The AI-Generated Apps?
  7. “AI”-Assisted Refactoring Golf
  8. Training & Mentoring is a Common Good
  9. Is “AI-First” a Strategy, an Ideology, or a Performance?
  10. To Build A High-Performing Team, You Need To Get Inside The Bubble
  11. We Don’t Out-Deliver The Competition. We Outlearn them.
  12. Manual Refactoring: Python – Introduce Parameter Object & Move Instance Method
  13. What Is A “Good Software Developer”, Anyway?
  14. The Future of Software Development is Software Developers
  15. The Age of Coding “Agents”? Or The Age of “LGTM”?
  16. What’s In A Name?
  17. When Should We Do Code Reviews?
  18. Do You Know Where Your Load-Bearing Code Is?
  19. Modular Design: The Secret Sauce
  20. “Our senior developers already know this stuff, Jason?”
  21. 101 Uses of An Abstract Test #43: Contract Testing
  22. Refactoring – The Most Important, Least-Understood Dev Skill
  23. The Seven Deadly Sins of “Go Faster”
  24. Cause or Correlation?
  25. The Tiger In The Magic Eye Picture
  26. When Evaluating Software Development Advice, Consider The Scale It’s Been Tested On
  27. Myth: “AI-Generated Code Doesn’t Need To Be Easy To Understand”
  28. Is Software The UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines?
  29. If I Was Your Head of Engineering…
  30. “Productivity”. You Keep Using That Word.
  31. The AI-Ready Software Developer #17 – Back To The Future (Again)
  32. The AI-Ready Software Developer #16 – A Token of Our eXtreme
  33. The AI-Ready Software Developer #15 – It’s (Still) About The Team
  34. The AI-Ready Software Developer – Index
  35. The AI-Ready Software Developer #14 – Continuous Architecture
  36. The AI-Ready Software Developer #13 – *You* Are The Intelligence
  37. The AI-Ready Software Developer #12 – Ground Truth
  38. The AI-Ready Software Developer #11 – Staying Sharp
  39. The AI-Ready Software Developer #10 – Comprehension Debt
  40. The AI-Ready Software Developer #9 – Well-Trodden Paths
  41. The AI-Ready Software Developer #8 – Continuous Integration
  42. The AI-Ready Software Developer #7 – Commit On Green, Revert On Red
  43. The AI-Ready Software Developer #6 – Continuous Refactoring
  44. The AI-Ready Software Developer #5 – Continuous Inspection
  45. The AI-Ready Software Developer #4 – Continuous Testing
  46. The AI-Ready Software Developer #3 – One Problem At A Time
  47. The AI-Ready Software Developer #2 – Clarifying With Examples
  48. The AI-Ready Software Developer #1 – Separation of Concerns
  49. Wax On, Wax Off
  50. Is Your Development Team “AI-Ready”?
  51. TDD Under The Microscope #3 – One Outcome Per Test
  52. Why You (Probably) Won’t Get Rich Building With LLMs
  53. The Passionate Programmer: Too Passionate, Perhaps?
  54. Mission Statement
  55. If Releases Are Experiments, What’s Your Hypothesis?
  56. LLMs, Context Windows & Brown M&Ms
  57. Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code
  58. TDD Under The Microscope #2 – Assert First
  59. What Are The “Objects” in “Object-Oriented Programming”?
  60. TDD Under The Microscope #1 – Usage-Driven Design
  61. Code Reviews as Exploratory Testing
  62. Clever Hans Couldn’t Really Do Arithmetic, and LLMs Don’t Really Understand.
  63. eXtreme Programming Reborn: Code Craft & “A.I.”
  64. The LLM In The Room: ChatGPT Speaks
  65. Micro-Iterations, Maps & “Interruptibility”
  66. What If FOMO Itself Is Why We Miss Out?
  67. Enterprise Refactoring Requires Enterprise Tests
  68. Will The Money People Pull The Plug On The A.I. “Space Race”?
  69. Five Boring Things That Have A Bigger Impact Than “A.I.” Coding Assistants On Dev Team Productivity
  70. It’s the System, Stupid!
  71. The Real Secret of Prompt Engineering
  72. The A-Z of Code Craft – U is for Users
  73. The A-Z of Code Craft – T is for Team
  74. The A-Z of Code Craft – S is for Safety
  75. It’s The Team, Stupid!
  76. The A-Z of Code Craft – R is for Refactoring
  77. The A-Z of Code Craft – Q is for Quality
  78. The A-Z of Code Craft – P is for Precondition
  79. It’s The Bottlenecks, Stupid!
  80. Why Software Design At Any Level Needs Us To See The Whole
  81. The A-Z of Code Craft – O is for Outside-In
  82. The Obligatory Post About A Profession of Software Development
  83. The A-Z of Code Craft – N is for Non-Blocking
  84. The A-Z of Code Craft – M is for Modularity
  85. The A-Z of Code Craft – L is for Liskov
  86. The A-Z of Code Craft – K is for K.I.S.S.
  87. The A-Z of Code Craft – J is for Just-In-Time
  88. The A-Z of Code Craft – I is for Iterative
  89. The A-Z of Code Craft – H is for Hexagonal
  90. The A-Z of Code Craft – G is for GUI
  91. The A-Z of Code Craft – F is for Freedom
  92. The A-Z of Code Craft – E is for Encapsulation
  93. The A-Z of Code Craft – D is for D.R.Y.
  94. The A-Z of Code Craft – C is for Continuous
  95. The A-Z of Code Craft – B is for Builds
  96. The A-Z of Code Craft – A is for Agility
  97. The LLM In The Room
  98. We Don’t Make Food. We Design Kitchens.
  99. Over-organising, Under-organising & Just Enough Organising

2024 4

  1. The Rule Of Three Kata
  2. All The Code’s A Stage…
  3. Rookie Mistake: Minimising “Interruptions”
  4. Rookie Mistakes

2023 8

  1. The Bluffer’s Guide to Principles of Software Engineering Management
  2. The Bluffer’s Guide to A Spiral Model of Software Development and Enhancement
  3. The Bluffer’s Guide to Managing The Development of Large Software Systems
  4. The Bluffer’s Guide to The Design of Everyday Things
  5. The Bluffer’s Guide to Structured Programming
  6. The Bluffer’s Guide to Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
  7. The Bluffer’s Guide to The Mythical Man-Month
  8. The Illusion Of Developer “Productivity” Opens The Door To Snake Oil

2021 17

  1. GitHub Copilot – Productivity Boon or Considered Harmful?
  2. Wax On, Wax Off. There’s Value In Simple Exercises.
  3. Measuring Inner-Loop Agility
  4. Inner-Loop Agility (or “Why Your Agile Transformation Failed”)
  5. Solve The Problem You’ve Got, Not The One You Want
  6. Code Craft – The Proof of the Pudding
  7. ‘Agility Theatre’ Keeps Us Entertained While Our Business Burns
  8. The Trouble With Objects
  9. How To (And Not To) Use Interfaces
  10. What Is ‘Leadership’ Anyway?
  11. Forget SOLID. Say Hello To SHOC Principles for Modular Design.
  12. A Vision for Software Development: It’s All About Teams
  13. There’s No Such Thing As “Agile”. There’s Just Software Development.
  14. Fast-Running Tests Are Key To Agility. But How Fast Is ‘Fast’?
  15. Training Is Expensive. But Not As Expensive As Not Training.
  16. I’m A Slacker, And Proud Of It
  17. Beware False Trade-offs

2020 48

  1. Big Test Set-Ups Don’t Necessarily Point to Design Problems
  2. What Can We Learn From The Movie Industry About Testing Feedback Loops?
  3. Stuck In Service-Oriented Hell? You Need Contract Tests
  4. Don’t Succumb To Illusions Of Productivity
  5. The Jason’s Guitar Shack kata – Part I (Core Logic)
  6. Readable Parameterized Tests
  7. Pull Requests & Defensive Programming – It’s All About Trust
  8. Codemanship Code Craft Videos
  9. Leading By Example
  10. Slow Tests Kill Businesses
  11. Where’s User Experience In Your Development Process?
  12. Proactive vs Reactive Learning (or “Why Your Company Only Does Easy Things”)
  13. The Software Design Process
  14. Will There Be A Post-Pandemic IT Boom?
  15. Modularity & Readability
  16. 10 Things Every *Good* Software Development Method Does
  17. Automate, Automate, Autonomy!
  18. Why COBOL May Be The Language In Your Future
  19. Is Your Agile Transformation Just ‘Agility Theatre’?
  20. How The Way We Measure “Productivity” Makes Us Take Bad Bets
  21. Why I Abandoned Business Modeling
  22. Refactoring Complex Conditionals To Conditional Look-ups
  23. Is UML Esperanto for Programmers?
  24. Introduction to Test-Driven Development Video Series
  25. New Refactoring: Replace Conditional With Lambda Map
  26. Developer Coaching for Beginners
  27. Scheduled Online TDD Courses, May – July
  28. For Distributed Teams, Code Craft is Critical
  29. Lunchtime Learnings in TDD
  30. New Refactoring: Remove Feature
  31. Test-Driven Development in Python
  32. The Experience Paradox
  33. Test-Driven Development in JavaScript
  34. Are Only 1 in 4 Developers Trusted?
  35. Trust & Agility
  36. Extreme Programming Is Dead. Long Live Extreme Programming.
  37. A Programmer’s “Breadboard”?
  38. Code, Meet World #NoBacklogs
  39. Do We Confuse Work With Value?
  40. The Value’s Not In Features, It’s In Learning
  41. Codemanship’s Code Craft Road Map
  42. The Return of Micro-Methods
  43. Ant Colonies, Agile At Scale & The Illusion Of Control
  44. Codemanship’s Code Craft Road Map
  45. Do Our Tools Need A Rethink?
  46. Code Craft Bootstrapped
  47. 4 Out Of 5 Developers Would Choose To Stay Developers. Is It Time We Let Them?
  48. How A Developer’s Career *Should* Work

2019 24

  1. It’s About The Loops, Stupid!
  2. The Xmas Train Kata
  3. Does The Means Justify The End?
  4. Changing Legacy Code Safely
  5. The 4 Gears of Test-Driven Development
  6. Adventures In Multi-Threading
  7. The Test Pyramid – The Key To True Agility
  8. Iterating Is The Ultimate Requirements Discipline
  9. How Agile Works
  10. The 2 Most Critical Feedback Loops in Software Development
  11. Automated Tests Aren’t Just For The Long-Term
  12. How to Beat Evil FizzBuzz
  13. Action(Object), Object.Action() and Encapsulation
  14. Code Craft : Part III – Unit Tests are an Early Warning System for Programmers
  15. Code Craft : Part II – Version Control is Seat Belts for Programmers
  16. Code Craft : Part I – Why We Need Code Craft
  17. Code Craft’s Value Proposition: More Throws Of The Dice
  18. “Stateless” – You Keep Using That Word…
  19. In-Process, Cross-Process & Full-Stack Tests
  20. Standards & Gatekeepers & Fitted Bathrooms
  21. Digital Is A Process, Not A Project
  22. The Gaps Between The Gaps – The Future of Software Testing
  23. Overcoming Solution Bias
  24. What’s The Point of Code Craft?