“My working hypothesis is that human beings are too slow when dealing with code. If we’re going to move at the speed of the agents, we’re all going to have to back off a little bit and maintain high-level supervision.”

On this episode of HangarDX, Ankit Jain sits down with Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob), co-author of the Agile Manifesto and author of Clean Code, to talk about:

Why he stopped reading code, and the constraints he uses instead: unit tests, CRAP scores, mutation testing, and Gherkin,
Why code review is slowing teams down, and why only humans can be responsible for what agents produce, and
How a single engineer may now do the work of a team, and why Clean Code principles still apply.

Note: At 17:05 Uncle Bob starts sharing his screen, so we recommend watching a video version of this episode to tget the full experience: https://youtu.be/5kCISBJwoZo

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:48 How Uncle Bob codes today
03:12 What changed his mind about AI coding
04:52 Three constraints: unit tests, CRAP, and mutation testing
08:06 Aligning tests with intent
09:38 Gherkin and human-authored specs
11:00 Human judgment as the final arbiter
12:52 Small functions, readability, and complexity
13:20 Relaxing constraints as agents improve
13:54 Code written for agents, not humans
15:10 The future of code review and software teams
17:55 A dynamic UML tool for reviewing agent output
21:09 Architecture diagrams as a review surface
23:05 Disciplines every team needs
25:25 Why harness engineering is overrated
26:37 From harness to a single trusted agent
27:59 Are software factories doomed?
28:30 The AI exponential curve and its physical limits
29:30 Future optimizations and quantum computing
29:58 Responsibility and ownership of AI-generated code
32:26 Rewriting Clean Code for the AI era
33:30 Why Clean Code principles still apply

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