Test Double | Insights and Blogs

Dark illustration showing a tangled gray scribble labeled "AI" resolving into a glowing green line that climbs upward through icons for code, systems, communication, and metrics before reaching a glowing star labeled "The Plot (Again): Meaning. Impact. Direction.

Software engineering and AI: Finding the plot(again)

Is "clean code" still the point when an agent writes it? River Bailey unpacks quality, tech debt, and what it means to be a product engineer.

River Lynn Bailey

Communication & teams

An airy bridge with complex structural foundations deep in the ground

Developers

Why quality software is expensive (to build)

Shawn Rinehart

Maximize software investment

Leadership

AI amplifies everything (including what's broken). Start there.

Jen Tedrow

Agentic trainer Dave working on Ride with Dave

Developers

The moat is made of people

Jed Schneider

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Double Takes

TDDing with Claude is like having a pair that removes all the failing assertions every time you go to the bathroom.

Steve Jackson

State machines are the answer for those seeking determinism in the era of AI agents.

Dave Mosher

A Slack conversation left Doc reflecting on what bug bashes say about the systems we work in.

Doc Norton

Test-driven development is to programming what double-entry bookkeeping is to accounting.

Neal Lindsay

The fundamental character flaw of the software creator is not the misguided belief that they can solve any problem with software. Instead, it is the belief they can understand how their own software works before they create it.

Steve Jackson

We may need a SaaS appendix for Zawinski's law:

Any SaaS platform attempts to expand until it is a social network.

Matt Jones

Work desk neatly arranged with architecture systems diagram showing stylized legacy hardware on one side and modern cloud systems on the other

Leadership

How I'd start a legacy modernization project now

What leadership needs when they’re considering a legacy modernization initiative is a scored diagnosis: every finding rated on how bad it is and what kind of problem it is.

Mike Doel

Legacy modernization

legacy-modernization

ai-ml

assessments

efficient software

scaling-challenges

Product development when the rules keep changing, agentic trainer Dave working on Ride with Dave

Leadership

Outputs are cheap. Being wrong isn't.

The cost of writing software has collapsed. The cost of writing the wrong software hasn't. When you can ship faster than you can plan, product development looks different and a different kind of partnership makes that sustainable.

Todd Kaufman

ai-ml

founders

greenfield-product-development

product-innovation

quality

Developers

What it takes to keep humans in the lead with AI

Teams actually shipping AI products build a system that keeps agents honest with humans in charge.

Dave Mosher

ai-ml

dev-experience

greenfield-product-development

product-innovation

devops

Flow from plan to review to build to investigate with Han plug-in

Developers

Introducing Han: A research, plan, and implement plugin, without the rails

There are a lot of good ways to bring research, planning, and implementation structure to AI coding tools. Han is built for people who would rather pick their own path than ride someone else's track.

River Lynn Bailey

ai-ml

dev-experience

open-source

An idea board overflowing with both new and old post its and papers

Product managers

Great company cultures hold people accountable

Principles without consequences are aspirations. Here's the framework for turning codified culture into real behavioral change.

Michael Toland

Product management

communication

culture

leadership

product-innovation

teams

Tradeoffs chart for changeability, cost, and reliability

Leadership

What is legacy software in the age of AI?

Software becomes legacy by succeeding long enough to accumulate the weight of every decision and shortcut made along the way. Users feel it as friction. Engineers feel their momentum slip. The business watches costs climb. AI changes two of those. The third may be getting worse.

Todd Kaufman

Legacy modernization

legacy-modernization

scaling-challenges

ai-ml

teams

dev-experience

Three people emerge from darkness toward light and a neon green path

In the age of AI we’re in this together

The hardest part of the AI shift for developers isn't the tooling—it's the identity reassessment underneath it. Senior Software Consultant River Lynn Bailey shares what's helped her work through that fear and emerge on the other side.

River Lynn Bailey

ai-ml

professional-growth

dev-experience

productivity

communication

Cognitive hazard study diagram showing a laptop, coffee mug, and documentation sinking into a tarpit

Leadership

Organizational observability: The AI alignment problem starts upstream

Most agent misalignment doesn't start in the model. It starts upstream, in organizations that haven't made their own intent visible enough to navigate.

Dave Mosher

ai-ml

teams

systems

leadership

strategy

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