About RACE Programming
Why this site
First Line Software is a global software engineering company, founded in 2010 by a team whose engineering roots reach back to the early days of Agile. The same team had earlier led a company that, from 2002, was among the first to practice eXtreme Programming with clients. It was also among the first to adopt Scrum as a standard way of working, as soon as formal Scrum training appeared. Our CEO, Nick Puntikov, co-authored one of the first research papers on distributed Scrum together with Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum and an advisor to First Line Software.
In the mid-2020s, capable AI began reshaping software development quickly and deeply, and we needed to adapt again. That is why First Line Software initiated this project: to modify its SDLC for the new, fast-changing AI reality.
We had the right leader for it: Pavel Khodalev, our CTO and Head of AI Lab. Before this, Pavel led engineering and technology at enterprise scale. As Field CTO at the largest bank in Eastern Europe, he led one of the largest Agile transformations in banking history (more than 11,000 people). He also held senior engineering leadership at Deutsche Bank. He is the author of the AI-First Manifesto and a keynote speaker on AI-native engineering (CAIO Summit, AI4).
At First Line Software, he runs the AI-native delivery center of excellence and works directly with clients on their own transformations.
The outcomes of this initiative are published here as it progresses. We believe the industry benefits when frameworks are published openly, critiqued in the open, and allowed to evolve through the contributions of practitioners beyond a single organization.
How RACE Programming came about
The framework did not begin as a framework. It began as a set of practical answers to a practical problem: First Line Software needed to run production delivery in a world where AI coding systems were becoming genuinely capable, and none of the existing SDLC frameworks handled that shift well. Scrum-with-AI did not produce the productivity gains the business expected. Adding Copilot to a Jira backlog was not a framework.
A stable pattern emerged over a series of transformation experiments inside First Line Software, led by Pavel and scaled from one team to many: specific roles, artifacts, ceremonies, and tooling. Once the pattern stabilized and the economics became reproducible, Pavel authored, elaborated, and formalized the concept and coined the name RACE Programming.
The framework, in brief
RACE Programming is an Agentic SDLC framework: engineer-led, agent-executed. It lets teams build software at the client's idea-generation speed, roughly 2 to 3 days from idea to enterprise-grade production. It is derived from AI-First Theory and the AI-First Manifesto, and visualized through a Formula 1 race-team metaphor. See the Framework and the Theory.
Pavel Khodalev is the author and creator of RACE Programming. First Line Software is its home: the company where the framework was built, pioneered, and refined on real commercial projects in 2024 to 2026.
Contact
Email: hello@raceprogramming.com.
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/khodalev.
First Line Software: firstlinesoftware.com.
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