Gears Within Gears

One of the more useful definitions of software architecture comes from Building Evolutionary Architectures: architecture is definitionally the stuff that’s hard to change.1 I’ve always found this definition to be the most honest framing available, to say…

When a company hits a ceiling on its core business, it often tries to grow demand.

We have entered a period in which AI is able to author more code than is reviewable by humans.

This is a transcription of a talk given by Mary Poppendieck, The Tyranny of the Plan, lightly edited by me for readability and brevity.

By the end of 2025, a question that’s hung over the industry for the past year—is agentic software development a novelty, or is it here to stay?

Hi there!

I’m Brian Guthrie, a software engineer, leader and entrepreneur based in New York City.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about good generative AI practices, most particularly for code.

The myth of objectively good code For as long as people have been writing software, people who write software have been arguing about how to write it.

The quest to kill meetings A few years ago I was leading the consumer product engineering division at a startup, and one of the teams I was leading was repeatedly flagging the same issue: too many meetings.

Happy Gilmore is a 1996 Adam Sandler movie about a guy who’s weirdly good at driving golf balls, and so becomes a golf celebrity even though the rest of his technique is terrible.

I used to run an internal software platform department (infrastructure, tooling, devops), and every so often, it was our immense honor—and, indeed, joy—to delete old code.

I built an entire startup on top of an event-sourced data architecture.

From time to time I come across a problem that I don’t know how to solve but that I’m certain someone else must have already solved.

I’ve worked in the software industry for over twenty years.

I originally wrote this on Twitter in 2017.

I originally wrote this on Twitter in 2017.

The end of an era It’s been rough couple of years for Thoughtworks.