Fragments: October 21 🔗
Gergely Orosz is frustrated at those that entered his explicitly “No AI” essay competition and used AI. He goes on to say: When I start to suspect som [...]
Martin Fowler
Posts
When Software Meets Hardware 🔗
When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes [...]
Build your slide template 🔗
Building a slide template starts with three foundational choices — colours, fonts and layouts. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe covers the basics of [...]
The Craft of Practitioner Voice 🔗
A couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing. He now adds a s [...]
Are Harnesses Worth the Cost? 🔗
Naresh Jain compares coding agents building the same API service with and without a behavioral harness. A frontier model, GPT-6 Sol, passe [...]
Fragments: October 4 🔗
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 hav [...]
Principles for effective slides 🔗
Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than [...]
Bliki: Sensible Default 🔗
A Sensible Default is a practice that, absent some overriding context, should be used when carrying out a certain kind of task. In software develo [...]
Fragments: September 29 🔗
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 am [...]
Fragments: September 24 🔗
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 [...]
Healthy Feedback 🔗
Human collaboration, like most things, improves with feedback. But it's not obvious how to make feedback effective. Anuja Karnik and Sumee [...]
I don't like LLMs 🔗
I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in producti [...]
Fragments: September 16 🔗
Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible. Simon Willi [...]
Nail the Narrative 🔗
Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises dist [...]
Social Media Engagement: summer 2026 🔗
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 [...]
Fragments: September 8 🔗
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 [...]
Do you even need a presentation? 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It' [...]
Fragments: August 18 🔗
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? 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be [...]