Episode
Technical Debt as Crime Scene 🔍 — with Adam Tornhill
- Podcast
- Refactoring Podcast
- Published
- Aug 29, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2912
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Summary
Today's guest is Adam Tornhill! Adam is the author of the popular book Your Code as a Crime Scene, and he's the founder of Code Scene. With Adam, we discussed his unique insights about technical debt and code quality, which come from his study of forensic psychology. We explored how static analysis is not enough to understand code health and why you need to look into version control history to understand hotspots, change distribution and bus factor. And finally, we inevitably talked about AI and how it changes, or maybe does not change, how we should write code.(01:23) Introduction(02:25) Adam's journey into tech(05:58) The crime scene metaphor(08:27) Version control history(10:22) A natural law of software(14:03) Code Red(15:56) Assessing good code health(22:31) Distribution of impact and the bus factor(25:33) Reducing bus factor(29:57) Reassessing knowledge(32:25) The entropy of code bases(34:53) AI in code analysis(39:44) The impact of AI coding(41:58) Preventing technical debt(44:13) The actual developer tool space(46:21) Code data and team ceremonies—This episode is brought to you by Augment Code! Augment Code is the only AI engineering platform built for real engineering teams.Learn more at augmentcode.com!—You can also find this at:• 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm• 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9dmzZDoDC8Q7EMbSw• 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/refactoring-podcast/id1719137305—For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]