Thesis: simple - antythesis: easy - synthesis: ...

Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy is a great talk, a must see, with lot's of insight, but together with that it also misrepresents what Agile is about.  Hickey's main point is that we should try to write simple software, because this is the only way to have reliable software, and he is right of course.   He notes that when you encounter a new bug and try to fix it - all the existing tests pass - so they will not help you in finding the cause of it.  You need to do the bug analysis on your own  and the complexity of your code is your enemy there.  He is also right when he talks about how easy means familiar a not simple and that it is a trap because it drives us away from the other (in small increments I would add).  He is insightful when he talks about things that are source of complexity.   He is funny, but missing the point in his critique of Agile.

The development sprints he attacks are not about doing the bulk of the work - they are about building a prototype on which we can test our assumptions.  Without the understanding that we get from these prototypes we could simplify as much as we want but it would not change the fact that our solution solves the wrong problem.  Agile is not an enemy of simple, it puts a lot of weight to doing the easy - but not because this is the goal - rather it uses easy as a mean to get to the correct. Agile is the answer to the paradox that we don't know what we should make until we already have a prototype of that thing.  I wish more developers cared about simple - but only after they know what is needed.