November 2025
Intermediate
1h
English
video
Live with Tim O’Reilly: A Conversation with Author and Programmer Kent Beck
by Tim O'Reilly, Kent Beck
Closed Captioning available in German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Portugal, Brazil), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional)
Overview
Messy code has always been a problem. AI-generated code, which can be verbose, poorly documented, and possibly hallucinatory, only raises the stakes. Luckily, we have Kent Beck, whose career-long mission has been to improve software development. Kent created Extreme Programming back in the ’90s to address some of the issues that were slowing productivity. More recently, he’s been working on a series to help “tidy” development. (In the initial book, Tidy First?, he likens a “tidying” to “a little baby miniature refactoring.”) Kent will join me on Live with Tim O’Reilly to share his philosophy. As you’ll find out, it goes well beyond simply cleaning up your code. Kent will explain how tidying can perhaps “bring peace, satisfaction, and joy to your programming.”
Tidy First? gives programmers a set of tools to help improve their code through small steps taken over time. We’ll get into some of them, but I also want Kent to take us through what a “tidy” approach to AI-generated code might look like. He’s been sharing his own experiments with AI tools on his blog, and gave an overview on the subject at our first AI Codecon, so I’m interested to hear his takeaways from collaborating with the “genie”—his term for AI tools, which may grant your wish but usually not in the way you wanted.
But we’ll also think bigger. Kent’s forthcoming book, Tidy Together, expands the focus from individuals to the teams collaborating to “grow” software (importantly, not “assemble” it). As Kent explains, this reframing underscores that the system in which your software is developed is equally as important as the software itself, so you need to tend to it. It’s a beautiful metaphor that gets at the centrality of what’s organic and human about software development. And of course, there’s part three of the series on the horizon. Throughout, we’ll take your questions about tidying up, GenAI, and Kent’s illustrious career. (Among other achievements, he’s a co-creator of JUnit and a coauthor of the Agile Manifesto.) I look forward to seeing you there.
Recommended prep or follow-up:
- Read Tidy First? (book)
- Read Tidy Together (early release book)
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Watch now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.