Software Design: Tidy First?

Switching Scale

A genie-commanding superpower

Kent Beck's avatar
Kent Beck
Sep 05, 2025
∙ Paid

I once had a coaching student, one of the brightest I ever taught, who simply couldn’t switch between scales. Put them in a situation with a task & they could blaze through it, accumulating tremendous context in their head & manipulating it. But jumping from that scale to the next scale up or down? Instant confusion.

Staying stuck at one scale was becomi…

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