Why a new manifesto Writing code is no longer the slow, expensive part of building software. Knowing what to build, proving it works, and keeping it working are. The 2001 manifesto was written for a world where requirements were guessed up front and software arrived too late to correct course. Its answer was short feedback loops with real customers, and that answer still holds. But several of its…
One of my AI agents once argued with me about a rule it had already broken. A rule written down means somebody agreed to it once. A rule in force means something fails when it breaks, and the failure happens in a way that can't be ignored. The first system I put together was built to write code for me. The system produces good output because I give the agents coding guidelines and specific, small…
A few days ago Jer Crane, the founder of PocketOS — a SaaS for car-rental businesses — published an account of how his company’s entire production database, plus the backups, got deleted in roughly nine seconds. The actor was an AI coding agent: Cursor, running Anthropic’s Claude, doing what Crane described as a routine task. By Crane’s own telling, the agent encountered a credential mismatch and…