We now have Kerr’s Law

Dave Kerr created hacker laws, and now he finds himself reviewing agent-written code for them. Back on the show after six years, Dave names what he sees limiting teams today: keeping everyone’s mental model in sync with what’s actually been built. Adam declares it Kerr’s Law on the spot. We get into why Dave’s team treats code review as a deliberate slowdown, how Shellwright lets agents bring evidence to a pull request, and what living with bipolar disorder has taught Dave about noticing when the excitement of these tools stops being healthy.

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Featuring:

Dave Kerr – Website, GitHub, X

Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

Kerr’s Law — A team’s ability to scale is limited by its ability to keep a shared mental model in sync with the system it builds.

Dave Kerr’s website

Hacker Laws

Effective Shell

Ark (Agents at Scale)

Shellwright

Tailscale

Playwright

asciinema

k9s

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!