JavaBin FDD — Fear-Driven Development¶
May 6, 2026 · LinkedIn
38 reactions · 2 comments · 1,738 views
I built 10,035 tests because I was scared.
Not "best practices" scared. Actually scared. The AI was generating code that looked perfect, passed review, and silently did the wrong thing. Byte-level wrong. The kind of wrong you only catch when a PCB manufacturer in Shenzhen emails you about corrupted drill files.
So I got paranoid. Systematically paranoid.
Round-trip testing: generate a file, parse it back, compare every byte. If the output isn't identical to the input, something lied. Property-based testing: throw thousands of random values at every parser and see what breaks. Battle testing: 191 real PCB files from real manufacturers, not sanitized examples.
10,035 tests later, zero AI-induced production bugs.
That's not luck. That's fear turned into infrastructure.
Tonight I'm talking about this at JavaBin Oslo: "Fear-Driven Development — How Productive Paranoia Builds Better AI Systems." Five specific fears, five systematic antidotes, and the complete method that came out of it.
The thesis is simple: fear without systems is just anxiety. Fear with systems is a competitive advantage.
Two new workshop bookings came in this week, so clearly the paranoia resonates. There's an open workshop on May 21th if you want to experience it yourself.
If you're in Oslo tonight — come to javaBin at Rebel.
javaBin #SDD #AIEngineering #FearDrivenDevelopment¶
Discussion¶
live is live ;) lets do whatever you feel compelled to do. I simply stopped looking at this numbers, specially as we move to the ai-factory design pattern we literally have a test for each "step" or "Logical" flow, so I probably have even more than you ;): live is live ;) lets do whatever you feel compelled to do. I simply stopped looking at this numbers, specially as we move to the ai-factory design pattern we literally have a test for each "step" or "Logical" flow, so I probably have even more than you ;)
TDD: TDD