Best of Agile — November 2025

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   Article

   Justin Searls·27w

   TDD is more important than ever

   Test-driven development skills are becoming critical for working effectively with AI coding agents. Developers experienced in TDD are both the most skeptical of AI code generation and the most successful at using it, because they understand how to build verification into workflows. AI agents, like human developers, need independent ways to verify their work—without verification, they resort to guessing, which compounds errors rapidly. The ability to establish automated testing and verification mechanisms, once a hallmark of agile practices, is now essential for enabling AI agents to produce reliable code through reinforcement learning.

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   Article

   marmelab·28w

   Spec-Driven Development: The Waterfall Strikes Back

   Spec-Driven Development frameworks like Kiro and Spec-kit generate extensive Markdown documentation before coding, echoing Waterfall methodology. While promising structure for AI coding agents, this approach creates context blindness, excessive documentation review, and diminishing returns on large codebases. The author argues for Natural Language Development instead: an iterative, Agile-inspired approach where developers give coding agents simple, incremental instructions without formal specifications, enabling faster convergence toward working products.

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   Article

   Scott Logic·26w

   Putting Spec Kit Through Its Paces: Radical Idea or Reinvented Waterfall?

   Spec-Driven Development (SDD) proposes using detailed specifications as the source of truth for AI agents to generate code. Testing this approach with Spec Kit on a real feature rebuild revealed significant drawbacks: excessive markdown generation (2,500+ lines), long agent execution times (33+ minutes), and 3.5 hours of review overhead. Traditional iterative prompting proved 10x faster, completing the same work in 8 minutes of agent time with minimal review. The workflow felt like a return to waterfall methodology, producing duplicative documentation without improving code quality or reducing bugs. While SDD presents interesting ideas worth discussing, the practical implementation through Spec Kit doesn't capitalize on AI's strength of making code cheap and fast to produce.

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   Article

   Hacker News·27w

   The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition

   A comprehensive review of the 20th anniversary edition of 'The Pragmatic Programmer' by Dave Thomas and Andrew Hunt. The book covers fundamental software engineering principles including taking responsibility, DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), orthogonality, design by contract, decoupling, concurrency, testing, requirements gathering, and team practices. Updated with modern topics like security and concurrency, it replaces dated technology references with contemporary examples. The review highlights key tips throughout the book, such as 'Always Use Version Control,' 'Provide Options, Don't Make Lame Excuses,' and 'Refactor Early, Refactor Often.' While primarily aimed at beginners, the book offers valuable insights for senior developers mentoring juniors and those without formal CS education.

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