Latest episode
I Delete Tests Every Night (On Purpose)
August 4th, 2026
Better with Kent - durable skills for people who ship software.Every morning Kent wakes up to a PR that deletes more lines than it adds. Not flaky tests. Not broken tests. Low-signal ones — tiny wrappers, magic-number asserts, edge cases that will never happen — the kind AI agents love to generate overnight.This episode walks the trap (more green checks ≠ more confidence), the bar (fewer, longer tests written into testing-principles.md), a real cleanup PR (kody#603: +122 / −703), and the Cursor Automation that runs Keep Tests Tight at 03:00 MDT.Homework: run the cleanup once. Give an agent your testing principles and see what it deletes.Chapters * 0:00 — Cold open: I delete tests every night * 0:15 — Better with Kent intro * 0:33 — Every morning a PR that deletes more than it adds * 1:04 — More tests are not better tests * 2:03 — Tests are expensive to run / change * 2:33 — Agents love tiny tests (magic number 42) * 3:33 — Green checks are not confidence * 4:33 — Screen: testing-principles.md * 5:09 — Fewer, longer tests * 7:10 — Screen: kody#603 demo * 8:38 — Screen: Keep Tests Tight automation * 11:32 — Valuable at the time is not keep forever * 11:45 — Homework: run the cleanup once * 12:19 — Close: delete some more tests
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One durable skill per episode, straight to camera.
AI keeps making implementation cheaper. That doesn't make you less valuable — it moves the value. Knowing what to build, what to fix first, and what your users actually need is the work that stays scarce. That's what this show is about.
Each episode I take one skill, framework, or hard-earned lesson from real product work and land it in about fifteen minutes. No tool demos, no hype. And every episode ends with homework you can apply to your own backlog the same day.
New episodes publish on YouTube first, with audio everywhere you already listen.
Shipping code is getting easier. Shipping the right thing isn't.
The engineers who stay valuable are the ones who get better at judgment, prioritization, and understanding the people they build for.
The expensive mistake has changed.
When implementation was slow, bugs were the costly failure. Now agents can build the wrong thing faster than ever — and the wrong thing at speed is still the wrong thing.
These skills outlast the toolchain.
Frameworks and models churn. Problem clarity, prioritization, empathy, and ownership transfer across every stack, team, and product cycle.
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