Fragments: May 5 🔗
Over the last couple of months Rahul Garg published a series of posts here on how to reduce the friction in AI-assisted programming. To make it easier [...]
Martin Fowler
Posts
Bliki: Mythical Man Month 🔗
In the early 1960s, Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 computer systems. After it was done he penned his thoughts in the book T [...]
Fragments: April 29 🔗
Chris Parsons has updated his guide on using AI to code. This is his third update, what I like about it is that he gives a lot of concrete information [...]
Structured-Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD) 🔗
LLM programming assistants have demonstrated considerable value, but mostly with individual developers. The internal IT organization in Th [...]
Fragments: April 21 🔗
Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar. This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, [...]
Fragments: April 14 🔗
I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage. The video runs fo [...]
Alan Turing play in Cambridge MA 🔗
Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code. It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to bot [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Assessing internal quality while coding with an agent 🔗
Erik Doernenburg is the maintainer of CCMenu: a Mac application that shows the status of CI/CD builds in the Mac menu bar. He assesses how [...]