The Joel Test: 25 Years Later

In 2000 Joel Spolsky published his famous 12-point test for rating the quality of a software company. A quarter of a century has passed since then. Time for an update.

1. Can you delete a module and regenerate it from scratch in an hour? If not, your spec lives in the code rather than in the docs and tests. Which means you have no spec.

2. Does the agent ship the MR itself, and roll it back itself? If the agent has to wait for a human with the right permissions and the right mood to free up, you don't have a pipeline. You have a queue at the clinic front desk.

3. Is code correctness verified without a human reading it? Humans have already lost that race. Tests, automated cross-review, an adversarial agent. Let the agents fight it out among themselves, not the meatbags.

4. Do you find out about breakage before your users do? "Fuck it, ship it" is the new reality. So your telemetry has to surface an anomaly in the smoke tests within minutes, not in a customer ticket titled "DO YOU EVEN TEST THIS???"

5. Is the agent's blast radius limited? Autonomy without boundaries is the "how we fucked it all up" scenario. Let agents do anything, except the irreversible.

6. Does work continue while the team sleeps? If everything grinds to a halt after 7 p.m., the bottleneck is you. What should be waiting for you in the morning is not a full backlog but a stack of finished solutions.

7. Do you make decisions faster than agents write code? The feature is done in twenty minutes. The sign-off takes a week. Congratulations: you automated the wrong part of the process.

8. Can anyone on the team clearly state what they want? "Make it pretty" used to cost a week of a junior's time. Now it costs ten thousand lines of tech debt.

9. Do you argue, or do you test? When implementation is nearly free, debating two approaches takes longer than trying both. An "expert" opinion is now worth exactly one A/B test. Which is to say, fuck all.

10. Can you switch models or providers in a day? If you can't get off Claude, you're not using it. You're married to it. And you'll find out what's in the prenup after the divorce.

11. Do you know what a feature costs in tokens and lines? Infinite cheap code breeds infinite useless features. The key skill is not "generate" but knowing what you actually need.

12. Do you hire people for experience rather than specialization? If your interview process tests how well someone writes code, you're hiring a slow, expensive LLM.

Scoring.

12 out of 12. You are the company of the future. Or the "what could possibly go wrong" case study they will print in textbooks.

8-11. You are in the right spot: people no longer write code, but they still remember they work in tech.

4-7. You strapped a jet engine to a horse cart and wonder why it won't move.

0-3. I have bad news for you... Or, on the contrary, good news.