Bliki: Sensible Default đź”—
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 [...]
Martin Fowler
Posts
Fragments: September 29 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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? đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It' [...]
Fragments: August 18 đź”—
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? đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
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 đź”—
Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be [...]
The Orchestrator's Tax đź”—
Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the orc [...]
Why I’m Writing Rachel’s Ramblings 🔗
TL;DR I have ideas. I haven’t been writing them. That’s about to change. I promise… myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about talent. Actually, I’ve bee [...]
Fragments: July 21 đź”—
With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtwor [...]
The Archaeologist’s Copilot 🔗
When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing [...]
DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs đź”—
LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Abstractions and Dom [...]
Fragments: July 13 đź”—
Some more of my notes from Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. When we had our first retreat in Utah early this year, nobody had hear [...]
Experiences with local models for coding đź”—
Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and trie [...]