Feed - Martin Fowler

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 [...]

Fragments: February 13 🔗

I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not had as much time as I’d hope [...]

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 [...]

Fragments: February 9 🔗

Some more thoughts from last week’s open space gathering on the future of software development in the age of AI. I haven’t attributed any comments sin [...]

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 [...]

Fragments: February 4 🔗

I’ve spent a couple of days at a Thoughtworks-organized event in Deer Valley Utah. It was my favorite kind of event, a really great set of attendees i [...]

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 [...]

Conversation: LLMs and the what/how loop 🔗

A conversation between Unmesh Joshi, Rebecca Parsons, and Martin Fowler on how LLMs help us shape the abstractions in our software. We vie [...]

Stop Picking Sides: Manage the Tension Between Adaptation and Optimization 🔗

Jim Highsmith notes that many teams have turned into tribes wedded to exclusively adaptation or optimization. But he feels this misses the [...]

My favorite musical discoveries of 2025 🔗

My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic favorite of 80s returns, Ethio-jazz, Guatemalan singer-guitarist, jazz-rock/I [...]

Writing Fragments 🔗

If you’re a regular reader of my site, you’ll have noticed that in the last few months I’ve been making a number of “fragments” posts. Such a post is [...]

Fragments Dec 11 🔗

Why does AI write like… that (NYT, gift link). Sam Kriss delves into the quiet hum of AI writing. AI’s work is not compelling prose: it’s phantom text [...]

Fragments Dec 4 🔗

Rob Bowley summarizes a study from Carnegie Mellon looking on the impact of AI on a bunch of open-source software projects. Like any such study, we sh [...]

Fragments Nov 19 🔗

I’ve been on the road in Europe for the last couple of weeks, and while I was there Thoughtworks released volume 33 of our Technology Radar. Again it’ [...]

My Foreword to "Frictionless" 🔗

I find most writing on software productivity to be twaddle, but Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda are notable exceptions. I had a chance to take a [...]