Martin Fowler

Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI.

When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change.

Building a slide template starts with three foundational choices — colours, fonts and layouts.

A couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing.

Naresh Jain compares coding agents building the same API service with and without a behavioral harness.

In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t have a conscience) “Metalanguage” replied: we shipped the id and forgot the superego. classic software lifec…

Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them.

A Sensible Default is a practice that, absent some overriding context, should be used when carrying out a certain kind of task.

Simon Willison: The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge

Rob Bowley is “flipping tables in his head” with anger at the current media coverage of the danger of AI killing us all The risk I’m worried about isn’t a future machine deciding to wipe us out.

Human collaboration, like most things, improves with feedback.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology.

Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible.

Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative.

A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025. more…

Christian Catalini says we’re in a situation where we are vastly reducing the cost of generating things, but not the cost of verifying them:.

Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks.

The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage.

Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository.…

TL;DR Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems I was on a panel recently with Brian Houck from DX at Code Remix, hosted by Moderne.

Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose.

Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline their processes, save money, and juice margins.

I was listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Helen Toner about the recent OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and the subsequent discovery that there were swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned activities.

TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months.

Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content.

Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry.

My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software.

There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face.

TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra.

Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring more…

Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most.

TL;DR I have ideas.

With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat.

When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8.

LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries.

Some more of my notes from Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat.

Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding.

Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks.

Last week, Thoughtworks ran a second Future of Software Development Retreat, this time in Europe.

“Prag Dave” Thomas (co-author of the outstanding “Pragmatic Programmer”) has loved programming since he was young.

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports.

Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs.

Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. more…

Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security problems.