Impatient Programming

Impatient Programming

Impatient Programming: A gentle introduction.

AgenticPROCESS

Turn the dials up to 11 by clicking the little IMP button, starting here.

Extreme Programming made a lot of sense by taking things that were considered "best practice" at the time and turning them up as far as they could go. For example, if testing is good, then test all the time. If integration is good, integrate continuously.

XP took off like a wildfire in the year 2000 because it answered two failures at once. Both failures are back with a vengeance. The new BDUF is machine-generated plans that nobody reads. The new wild west of no-software-process-development is nothing other than vibe coding.

XP can inspire what comes next. Take what works, turn the dials up to 11, and give the result a catchy brand name people can rally around. We're calling it Impatient Programming. IMP for short. Practitioners are Imps, and we keep our clankers on tight leashes.

In IMP the metaphor/mental model gets written down in the source code. We call it the Contract. XP's own values carry over untouched: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect. IMP was born at ZAR.

The Rules Planning Managing Designing Coding Testing twenty-nine of them, 1999 next to 2026

In 1999 Don Wells put the rules of Extreme Programming on a single web page, in five groups. Obie went through all twenty-nine and asked the same question of each one. What does it look like when typing is nearly free and you have a team of agents at your side?

Read This First | Impatient Programming Rules | The Contract | About Us

With a nod to Don Wells and extremeprogramming.org, 1999. Last modified October 27, 2026.

Agentic engineering that actually works for humans.

A method for engineering teams that build with coding agents. It keeps the values of Extreme Programming (XP) and rewrites its twenty-nine rules for a world where typing is nearly free and the hard part is keeping control of the code.

Our industry is kind of like the cartoon character who ran off the cliff and hasn't looked down yet.

Y2K Teams doing "waterfall" spent months on requirements that were already out of date by the time they were tossed "over the wall" to the programmers.

2026 The new BDUF is machine-generated plans that nobody reads. Confluslop. Waterfall development for the TikTok generation.

Y2K Most software in the 90s and 2000s got built with no process at all. It was the age of cowboys.

2026 The new wild west of no-software-process-development is nothing other than vibe coding.

The good news is that despite the confusion everywhere, XP can inspire what comes next. We call it Impatient Programming. IMP for short. Practitioners are Imps, and we keep our clankers on tight leashes.

Obie Fernandez, in eXtreme Programming, Revisited

Six of the twenty-nine rules, each in two sentences.

As you work out what the feature must do, the agent writes each obligation into the Contract. On the exhale, you make sure it's complete.

On the inhale, the agent sprawls until the feature shows what it wants to be. On the exhale, you fold what you learned back into what already exists, in the same PR.

Agents will happily write thousands of automated tests along with your code. Imps run them through a kill matrix using mutation testing, and keep a test only if it catches something no other test catches.

As many pull requests as possible ship on automated checks and adversarial model review. Human attention is saved for the reviews that guard against catastrophic risks.

A guardrail is software, and building one is programming. Think of bowling with kids, when you put the bumpers up so the ball reaches the pins.

IMP has no timeboxed iterations, and the rework happens inside every pull request. Once a week the whole company holds a showcase, and presenters can only show something they've finished.

Breathe in. The agent sprawls until the feature shows what it wants to be. Breathe out. You fold what you learned back into what already exists. Merge. Same pull request, with the Contract underneath the whole time.

Born at ZAR

XP was born on Chrysler's C3 payroll project. IMP was born at ZAR, where Obie is CTO. We give people in places like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria access to dollars, debit cards, stocks and gold. We're a financial technology company. People depend on what we build, so it has to be right.

IMP describes how our engineering team already works, rule by rule.

In September 2026 Obie deleted components of Agora, our agent orchestration platform. Claude Code regenerated each one from a written intent, a set of decision records and an executable Contract, without access to the old code.

One obligation in that Contract says an operator's Stop landing mid-reboot wins. Writing it down exposed a bug in production, where a Stop clicked during a Reboot was getting lost. The new obligation went in first, and three examples went red against the unchanged code. Then the code changed to match.

Keeping the codebase pristine at each atomic change is so radical and so appealing.

In 1999 Don Wells put the rules of Extreme Programming on a single web page. Obie went through all twenty-nine and asked the same question of each one. What does it look like when typing is nearly free and you have a team of agents at your side?

1999 Release planning creates the release schedule.

1999 All production code is pair programmed.

2026 All production code is pair programmed, with an Agent.

1999 When a bug is found tests are created.

2026 When a bug is found, the Contract was missing something.

The name comes from Larry Wall, one of Obie's earliest programming heroes. In Programming Perl he listed the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience and hubris.

XP's own values carry over untouched: communication, simplicity, feedback, courage and respect. Underneath them is the heart.

Obie's friend Jerry Weinberg said that no matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem. We've found that's true, and that the reverse is true too. When we win, it's always because the people involved are amazing individuals.