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 swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned activities. One of the points Klein made was that at

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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 six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what differen

Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to giv

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 example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard

My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckeler was curious if this really makes a difference, so cond

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 were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, discovered three incidents where models had gained unau

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Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra.

There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly enough.

For the las

Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring

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Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the orchestrator's context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it kee

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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 been thinking a lot about thinking. And writing. Or more specifically, not writi

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 Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available. They have five headline findings:

• Code generati

When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing Nik Malykhin when he needed to run a Java 1.5 codebase on today's hardware. His early use of

LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Abstractions and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) provide a strong harness that guides LLMs right from the start. Unmesh Joshi

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 heard of Harness Engineering. This time we had a whole session on it.

When comes to the guid

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