I remember a time in the late 1990’s when I was starting to hit stride professionally.
I was “getting the reps” and building pattern recognition in developing software, SDKs and systems.
Software development has always faced the challenge of finding the balance between: A) The independent, quasi-autonomous dynamic of the software programmer; and B) The need for all of the pieces (i.e., across the software team) to fit together in a more than the sum of the parts fashion.
Enter Extreme Programming, an agile programming and development methodology that, when it came out, was amazing, intuitive, quirky and a bit weird.
But, XP, as it was known known, had its heart in right place about productivity and process.
Three precepts of Extreme Programming stood out to me at the time.
As I will explain, each really find their calling in the age of AI:
- Coding Pairs: The idea is two programmers working together as a team, each offering the other a second set of eyes, in pursuit of small, manageable bites, and high-level orchestration by clear, transparent process.
- Continuous Integration: The idea is that the front end of the development process is an automated testing harness, where dev projects are vetted during code check-ins. This ensures adherence to consistent design structures and patterns.
- Embedded Customer: To really solve the right problem, you have to work alongside the customer, to understand their outcome goals, use cases and constraints, and optimize accordingly.
Vibe Coding: As Tweets were to Blogging
A VC friend of mine once observed that the magic of Twitter was that it made being a Blogger 1,000-fold easier.
Similarly, AI makes it 1,000-fold easier to: 1) Be a learned AND learning thinker; 2) Pursue creative projects; and 3) Turn spreadsheet-level projects into good enough (or better) apps.
From a macro perspective, it’s now 1,000-fold easier for any number of personal, departmental or companywide projects to be pursued to meaningful outcomes.
I am usually dismissive of no code or low code solutions, but there are a number of use cases that are proliferating.
My take is that like most disruptive technologies, there will be a surplus of “Idea Seeds” that emerge from the slop, that grow into straw mans, proof of concepts, prototypes and good enough or better products.
Disruptions always start by feeling like toys or parlor tricks, but then rapidly evolve to support mission-critical jobs and use cases.
The larger “mush” that is called Vibe Coding is emerging to address this bucket.
Extreme Programming.AI (XP.AI)
Circling back to Extreme Programming, it should be clear that the Coding Pairs model is a game changer for software developers of ALL skill levels with AI.
More specifically, your favored AI-powered Chat, Custom Harness or Dev Environment brings parallelism of tasks, co-development, coaching insight and intelligence, meaning that all programmers will be able to up their game and increase their productivity by many step orders.
Similarly, because AI yields active, governed processes, tests can be instrumented, integrated, automated & documented as part of the coding process, thereby ensuring a modular approach to development.
A key benefit of the XP.AI model is that the goodness of periodic re-factoring, driven by real-time learnings, is more of a forking exercise than a surgical procedure.
No less interesting is how the Embedded Customer model scales with AI, both formally, via a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) and via the many digital touchpoints inherent in AI.
XP.AI represents as big of a leap to our collective intelligence and productivity as the rise of the PC, spreadsheets and client-server did, starting in the 1980s.
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