Fragments: September 8 đź”—
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:. This exp [...]
Martin Fowler
Posts
Do you even need a presentation? đź”—
Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks. He's started to write a series of posts on how to avoi [...]
Bliki: Paracelsus Maxim đź”—
The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few thing [...]
An Accidental Blackboard đź”—
Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, [...]
Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code đź”—
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 [...]
Fragments: September 1 đź”—
Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will fla [...]
Making Your Data Ready for Agentic AI đź”—
Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline their processes, save money, and juice margins. But AI's capabilities are [...]
Fragments: August 24 đź”—
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 s [...]
Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern đź”—
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 si [...]
Practitioner Voice: The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet đź”—
Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It' [...]
Fragments: August 18 đź”—
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 exampl [...]
TDD inside the agent loop - theater or actual value? đź”—
My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents [...]
Fragments: August 4 đź”—
There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face. This prompted Anthropic to check what their models we [...]
The Conductor Developer đź”—
TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software developm [...]
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring đź”—
Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be [...]
The Orchestrator's Tax đź”—
Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the orc [...]
Why I’m Writing Rachel’s Ramblings 🔗
TL;DR I have ideas. I haven’t been writing them. That’s about to change. I promise… myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about talent. Actually, I’ve bee [...]
Fragments: July 21 đź”—
With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtwor [...]
The Archaeologist’s Copilot 🔗
When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing [...]
DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs đź”—
LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Abstractions and Dom [...]
Fragments: July 13 đź”—
Some more of my notes from Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. When we had our first retreat in Utah early this year, nobody had hear [...]
Experiences with local models for coding đź”—
Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and trie [...]
Viability of local models for coding đź”—
Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that [...]
Fragments: July 6 đź”—
Last week, Thoughtworks ran a second Future of Software Development Retreat, this time in Europe. As with the previous event, I’ll be sharing some fra [...]
Fragments: June 16 đź”—
“Prag Dave” Thomas (co-author of the outstanding “Pragmatic Programmer”) has loved programming since he was young. Programming was how I could express [...]
Building Reliable Agentic AI Systems đź”—
One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers [...]
Fragments: June 2 đź”—
Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs. Would you measure lines of code ge [...]
The test suite as a regression sensor đź”—
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 VibeSec Reckoning đź”—
Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security [...]
Bliki: Vibe Coding đź”—
Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without loo [...]