Feed - Martin Fowler

Fragments: April 9 🔗

I mostly link to written material here, but I’ve recently listened to two excellent podcasts that I can recommend. Anyone who regularly reads these fr [...]

Feedback Flywheel 🔗

Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted Development. He proposes a structured feedback practice that harves [...]

Principles of Mechanical Sympathy 🔗

Modern hardware is remarkably fast, but software often fails to leverage it. Caer Sanders has found it valuable to guide their work with m [...]

Fragments: April 2 🔗

As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding [...]

Harness engineering for coding agent users 🔗

Last month Birgitta Böckeler wrote some initial thoughts about the recently developed notion of Harness Engineering. She's been researchin [...]

Encoding Team Standards 🔗

AI coding assistants respond to whoever is prompting, and the quality of what they produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team [...]

Fragments: March 26 🔗

Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and [...]

Bliki: Architecture Decision Record 🔗

An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents [...]

Fragments: March 19 🔗

David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck To be fair, finding defects has always been listed as a goal [...]

Context Anchoring 🔗

Conversations with AI are ephemeral, decisions made early lose attention as the conversation continues, and disappear entirely with a new [...]

Fragments: March 16 🔗

Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question was: Are AI tools shifting where engineers actu [...]

Fragments: March 10 🔗

Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data I agree with Brian Marick’s response No such story should be published with [...]

Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism 🔗

Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical c [...]

Humans and Agents in Software Engineering Loops 🔗

There's been much talk recently about how AI agents affect the workflow loops of software development. Kief Morris believes the answer is [...]

Design-First Collaboration 🔗

Rahul Garg continues his series of Patterns for Reducing Friction in AI-Assisted Development. This pattern describes a structured conversa [...]

Fragments: February 25 🔗

I don’t tend to post links to videos here, as I can’t stand watching videos to learn about things. But some talks are worth a watch, and I do suggest [...]

Knowledge Priming 🔗

Rahul Garg has observed a frustration loop when working with AI coding assistants - lots of code generated, but needs lots of fixing. He's [...]

Fragments: February 23 🔗

Do you want to run OpenClaw? It may be fascinating, but it also raises significant security dangers. Jim Gumbley, one of my go-to sources on security, [...]

Fragments: February 19 🔗

I try to limit my time on stage these days, but one exception this year is at DDD Europe. I’ve been involved in Domain-Driven Design, since its very e [...]

Bliki: Host Leadership 🔗

If you've hung around agile circles for long, you've probably heard about the concept of servant leadership, that managers should think of themselve [...]

Fragments: February 18 🔗

I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat ❄ ❄ We were tired after the event, but [...]

Bliki: Agentic Email 🔗

I've heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. The LLM has access to th [...]

Harness Engineering 🔗

Birgitta Böckeler explains why OpenAI's recent write-up on Harness Engineering is a valuable framing of a key activity in AI-enabled softw [...]

Bliki: Future Of Software Development 🔗

In Februrary 2026, Thoughtworks hosted a workshop called “The Future of Software Development” in Deer Valley Utah. While it was held in the mountain [...]

Context Engineering for Coding Agents 🔗

The number of options we have to configure and enrich a coding agent’s context has exploded over the past few months. Claude Code is leading the [...]

Bliki: Excessive Bold 🔗

I'm increasingly seeing a lot of technical and business writing make heavy use of bold font weights, in an attempt to emphasize what the writers thi [...]

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