The role of developer skills in agentic coding 🔗
As agentic coding assistants get more capable, Birgitta Böckeler is trying them to change existing codebases. This has led to some impres [...]
Martin Fowler
Posts
Commenting on removing "X" on US passports 🔗
The new US administration has decided to eliminate the “X” option for gender/sex on passports. I have several non-binary friends, and I don’t see why [...]
GenAI Patterns: Fine Tuning 🔗
While RAG is the most common way to focus a foundation model on material outside its training set, Bharani Subramaniam and I now finish ou [...]
GenAI Patterns: Guardrails and RAG overview 🔗
Gen AI systems are gullible, and can easily be tricked into responding in ways that are contrary to an enterprise's policies or leak confi [...]
What role does LLM reasoning play for software tasks? 🔗
Recent LLM models have provided “reasoning” capabilities. Birgitta Böckeler asks what role these play with coding tasks. She doesn't have [...]
GenAI Patterns: Reranker 🔗
LLMs struggle with large amounts of context. Bharani Subramaniam and I explain how to mitigate this common RAG problem with a Reranker whi [...]
GenAI Patterns: Query Rewriting 🔗
Users often have difficulty writing the most effective queries. Bharani Subramaniam and I explain Query Rewriting: getting an LLM to formu [...]
The DeepSeek Series: A Technical Overview 🔗
The appearance of DeepSeek Large-Language Models has caused a lot of discussion and angst since their latest versions appeared at the beginning [...]
GenAI Patterns: RAG Limitations and Hybrid Retriever 🔗
Today Bharani Subramaniam and I outline four limitations to the simple RAG from yesterday, and the pattern that addresses the first of the [...]
Panel at goto Copenhagen: "Where is SW development Going 🔗
was on a panel at goto Copenhagen last September with Holly Cummings, Trisha Gee, Dave Farley, and Daniel Terhorst-North. We discussed the [...]
GenAI Patterns: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 🔗
A pre-trained GenAI model lacks recent and specific information about a domain. Bharani Subramaniam and I explain how Retrieval Augmented [...]
Bliki: Forest And Desert 🔗
The Forest and the Desert is a metaphor for thinking about software development processes, developed by Beth Andres-Beck and hir father Kent Beck. [...]
Embeddings in GenAI Products 🔗
GenAI systems, like many modern AI approaches, have to handle vast quantities of data, and find similarities between elements in an image or [...]
Emerging Patterns in Building GenAI Products 🔗
Everyone is fascinated about using generative AI these days, and my colleagues are no exception. Some of them have had the opportunity to put [...]
Podcast with Luca Rossi 🔗
Luca Rossi hosts a podcast (and newsletter) called Refactoring, so it's obvious that we have some interests in common. The tile comes from me [...]
Codemods in other languages 🔗
Juntao Qiu finishes his description of codemods by looking at some other approaches outside the JavaScript world such as JavaParser and Op [...]
Fixing Common Pitfalls of Codemods 🔗
So far the codemods that Juntao Qiu has described are fascinating, but rather straightforward. Real codebases offer more challenges. In th [...]
My favorite musical discoveries of 2024 🔗
I've got into the habit of starting the New Year by sharing six favorite albums I discovered during the last year. This years set includes [...]
A more complex codemod 🔗
Juntao Qiu moves onto a more complex example of a codemod, one that extracts a tooltip responsibility from a JSX component. This illustrat [...]
Refactoring with Codemods to Automate API Changes 🔗
As a library developer, you may create a popular utility that hundreds of thousands of developers rely on daily, such as lodash or React. Over [...]
Design Token-Based UI Architecture 🔗
Design tokens are fundamental design decisions represented as data. Andreas Kutschmann explains how they work and how to organize them t [...]
Designing Data Products: next steps 🔗
Once we've designed our initial data products, Kiran Prakash finishes his article by leading us through the next steps: identifying comm [...]
Generalizing the design of data products 🔗
Having got an initial data product, Kiran Prakash leads us through the next steps: covering similar uses cases to generalize the data pr [...]
Designing data products: Working backwards from use cases 🔗
Increasingly the industry is seeing the value of creating data products as a core organizing principle for analytic data. Kiran Prakash [...]
Exploring Gen AI: Copilot's new multi-file editing 🔗
A very powerful new coding assistance feature made its way into GitHub Copilot at the end of October. This new “multi-file editing” capability [...]
Posting on Bluesky, and other thoughts on social media 🔗
With the recent uptick in tech activity on Bluesky, I've decided that I will start posting there in addition to my current locations. I' [...]
Assessing the results of using the Strangler Fig on a Mobile App 🔗
Matthew Foster and John Mikel Amiel Regida finish their account of how they incrementally modernized a mobile application by looking at [...]
Diving deeper into using the Strangler Fig with Mobile Apps 🔗
Matthew Foster and John Mikel Amiel Regida dive into the details of incrementally modernizing a legacy mobile application. They look at [...]
Using the Strangler Fig with Mobile Apps 🔗
My colleagues are often involved in modernizing legacy systems, and our approach is to do this in an incremental fashion. Doing this with a [...]
Interviewed by Book Overflow podcast on Refactoring 🔗
I was interviewed on the Book Overflow podcast about the Refactoring book. We talked about the origins of the book, the relationship bet [...]