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!