At Thoughtworks I participated in and ran this exercise where 2 teams do civil engineering projects with dry spaghetti and putty. Team Big Batch would build their tower (or whatever) in 1 hour, and Team Small Batch would build their tower in 20 minutes, and then get to do it again, and then get to do it again. Guess who wins?

My software engineering career benefitted a lot from this principle. I learned fast pairing with great engineers, but also by trying and failing in DX that provided very fast feedback. In our strongest teams, we put great care into building and improving our feedback loops. As an organisation, we built our own tools to do it.

Now I’m seeing the principle in action with coding agents. With a harness (that’s what we call DX for coding agents, I think) that provides fast feedback, coding agents can try, fail, and accumulate context until they succeed. Sometimes they get lucky, but typically success came because somewhere in that accumulated context there were answers – or even insights. What should we do with them? Note that you and I have benefitted from our insights over decades.

One project ended just as our team was reaching an incredible velocity. Everything had come together and we were absolutely smashing it, then we had to go home. What an accumulation of context we must have had when we threw away all our leverage – but that was business. We shouldn’t do it that way again with agents.