Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use.

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Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that influence how viable they are for the job.

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Last week, Thoughtworks ran a second Future of Software Development Retreat, this time in Europe. As with the previous event, I’ll be sharing some fragmentary thoughts on this. There were five parallel streams, so I could, at best, only attend ⅕ of ses

“Prag Dave” Thomas (co-author of the outstanding “Pragmatic Programmer”) has loved programming since he was young.

Programming was how I could express myself. I wasn’t an artist. When I sing, dogs howl. When I draw, friends say, “Very nice. What

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describe

Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs.

Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more

At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We talk about our experiences with LLM-augmented progra

Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play.

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Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security problems. Gautam Koul, Lucian Moss, Neil Drew-Lopez, and Daberechi Ruth Edeokoh share their experience w

Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without looking at any of the code that the LLM generates. This technique can be used by people without any knowled

Birgitta Böckeler adds discussion of three more sensors for static code analysis, focusing on checking and enforcing better modularity. Computational sensors for dependency checks were good at enforcing rules, but the rules were limited. Buildin

In her recent article about harness engineering for coding agent users, Birgitta Böckeler laid out a mental model for expanding a coding agent harness: a system of guides and sensors that increase the probability of good agent outputs and enable

Last week I spent a day at The Orchard Retreat, hosted by Mechanical Orchard. that brought together several people working in software development to talk about the profession’s future with the rise of agentic programming. The event was help under the

When we need an LLM to perform a complex task, we often need to feed it a lot of context. Coming up with a design for a new feature requires descriptions of how we want the feature to appear to the user, guidelines on how it should be implemented, info

Increasingly humans delegate writing code to agents. Will there even be source code in the future? To wrestle with this question, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: inst

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 to put these ideas into practice he’s now built an open-source framework to operationalize these patt

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 The Mythical Man-Month which became one of the most influential books on software development after i

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 about how he uses AI, with sufficient detail that we can learn from him. His advice also resonates wi

LLM programming assistants have demonstrated considerable value, but mostly with individual developers. The internal IT organization in Thoughtworks has been using them for their teams and have developed a method and workflow called Structured Prompt-D

Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar. This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, highlighting tools, techniques, platforms, and languages that we’ve used or otherwise caught our eye.