#16 Adam Tornhill

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

Links

• AI-Ready Code: How Code Health Determines AI Performance
• Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality
• Your Code as a Crime Scene
• Treat Your Code as a Crime Scene
• Beating the Averages
• CodeScene.com
• AdamTornhill.com