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Show notes
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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon – Get a generous discount by using changelogpod (think Earlybird pricing!). Learn more and register. WorkOS – WorkOS is building the infrastructure for the AI era. Explore three new product previews: Airlock for secure AI agent permissions, Atlas for deploying AI-built internal apps, and Passport for seamless, passwordless access to work apps. See the announcements, demos, and highlights in the WorkOS init() 2026 recap. Fingerprint – Detect threats, AI agents, and bots with device intelligence. 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!