Agile is Killing Software Innovation, Says Moxie Marlinspike

There's a rot at the heart of modern software development that's destroying innovation, and infosec legend Moxie Marlinspike believes he knows exactly what's to blame: Agile development. Marlinspike argued that Agile methodologies, widely adopted over the past two decades, have confined developers to "black box abstraction layers" that limit creativity and understanding of underlying systems. "We spent the past 20 years onboarding people into software by putting them into black box abstraction layers, and then putting them into organizations composed of black box abstraction layers," Marlinspike said. He contended this approach has left many software engineers unable to do more than derivative work, lacking the deep understanding necessary for groundbreaking developments. Thistle Technologies CEO Window Snyder echoed these concerns, noting that many programmers now lack knowledge of low-level languages and machine code interactions. Marlinspike posited that security researchers, who routinely probe beneath surface-level abstractions, are better positioned to drive innovation in software development.

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