Ward Cunningham

... as a software engineer.

And I remember talking with Kent Beck, who talked about how, uh, with, uh, Ward Cunningham, they, they came up with, with some of the basics of m- that might have been domain-driven design, or it might have been some, uh, some, some, some related concepts.

But they had a thesaurus in front of them trying to l- they searched for the right words on how to...

Oh, it was the design patterns.

Another explanation is that she has gotten into a car crash and is now unconscious in a hospital.

a law attributed to Ward Cunningham.

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.

Riley's Law of Retail Gravitation.

Six months later, that directory contained 61 unrelated files, zero coherent organization, and a reputation as the graveyard where code goes to retire.

Ward Cunningham introduced the technical debt metaphor in 1992, later formalized by Martin Fowler.

Taking shortcuts is like borrowing money.

You pay compounding interest until the principal is repaid.

[laughs]

And you're trying to find the right words to describe things, which is very curious, because when I talk with Kent Beck on how they used to program with Ward Cunningham, uh, as they were coming up with the concept of actually just domain design patterns, they had a thesaurus with them, and they would look through trying to find the right word that is, that has the right meaning, and they had it on their desk.

Right now this feels we're going back to the, the fundamentals, the, how that, that people have been asking themselves and, and every now and then people write it in books, and it kind of spreads as w- as wisdom.

And now we're back to where we started, which is what you're trying to teach us, [laughs] the wisdom part.

And if you think about it, this makes sense because software engineering literature is part of LLM training, so these terms are also part of the model's priors.

Just as interestingly, using the right words for describing your problem is not a new concept.

For example, when I had Ken back on the podcast, he talked about how 30 or 35 years back, when him and Ward Cunningham had a thesaurus on their desks, they used it to try to find the best words for the specific thing they were describing.

This was just another full circle moment on how words do matter.

Yeah.

And that goes back to Ward Cunningham when he first talked about the debt metaphor.

He was saying that, you know, the code has to reflect how we understand it, and if what we learn is not what's in the code, then we owe it to ourselves as a debt to put it back into the code so it says the things.

Well, this was echoing in my head as I got into agentic work because a big problem with agentic work is it takes a look at your code, it sees a path to completing the task you gave it.