In this episode I sit down with Adam Tornhill, founder of CodeScene, to talk about technical debt, Clojure, and why it's so hard to write good software.
Topics covered
- From electrical engineering to software psychology
- Why writing good code is so hard
- The origin story of CodeScene
- What technical debt really is, and why traditional metrics like cyclomatic complexity fall short
- Code health: measuring what makes code hard to understand
- Visualizing code to align engineering and management
- The story behind Your Code as a Crime Scene
- Making the business case for refactoring
- Lean manufacturing vs. software: the visibility problem
- Code quality and business impact (10× slower, 15× more defects)
- AI-friendly code: when LLMs break (and why)
- How technical debt amplifies AI failure rates
- AI as an engineering force multiplier (or multiplier of chaos)
- The future developer: AI team lead?
- Why Adam chose Clojure for CodeScene
- Immutability, REPLs, and iterative problem solving
- Test-driven development as cognitive support
- Performance myths in dynamic languages
- Parallelism made simple with immutability
- The real drawbacks of Clojure
- Static vs dynamic typing in large codebases
- Hiring in niche languages: small pool, strong engineers
- Naming, domain modeling, and long-term code health
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