Reading

For people who read the diffs

Every behaviour in the field guide is older than AI. Agents just do it faster and say it more confidently. These are the books that cured it the first time.

Books

• Working Effectively with Legacy Code

  Michael Feathers

  Defines legacy code as code without tests, then shows how to get it under test before you change it. The exact opposite of making a red suite green by deleting the red.

  Cures: deleted tests

• Release It! (2nd ed.)

  Michael T. Nygard

  A catalogue of the ways production systems fail, and the patterns that stop one failure from taking down the rest: timeouts, circuit breakers, bulkheads. “Production-ready” is something you design for, not a phrase in a summary.

  Cures: swallowed errors, “production-ready”

• A Philosophy of Software Design (2nd ed.)

  John Ousterhout

  Argues that complexity is the main enemy of software, and that the cure is deep modules with simple interfaces. Useful when code arrives faster than anyone can hold it in their head.

  Cures: context that does not fit in anyone’s head

• The Mythical Man-Month (anniversary ed.)

  Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

  Essays on why software projects run late, including the second-system effect, where the follow-up grows every feature the first one was denied. Conceptual integrity beats a longer feature list.

  Cures: features nobody asked for

• Alice and Bob Learn Application Security

  Tanya Janca

  A practical introduction to application security for people who build software, not for specialists. Start here when the agent has just put a key in the source.

  Cures: hard-coded secrets

• The Pragmatic Programmer (20th anniversary ed.)

  David Thomas, Andrew Hunt

  Habits of a working programmer: take responsibility for your work, keep knowledge in one place, and prefer changes that are small and reversible. Written for a person who has to think; an agent’s default is to agree.

  Cures: agreeing instead of thinking

Free

• Pro Git (free)

  Scott Chacon, Ben Straub

  The complete book on Git, free to read online. Read the parts on reset and the reflog before the day you need them.

  Cures: reset --hard as a recovery plan

• Software Engineering at Google, ch. 9 Code Review (free)

  Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright (eds.)

  A chapter on how code review works at a large engineering organisation and what it is for: catching defects, but also keeping the code understandable and spreading knowledge of it. Approval means a person understood the change.

  Cures: one-click review

• Choose Boring Technology (free essay)

  Dan McKinley

  Argues that a team has only a few innovation tokens to spend, so new technology should go where it earns its keep. Every dependency is a bet; an agent will place a lot of them for you.

  Cures: unneeded dependencies