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.

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 for about half-an-hour.

I always enjoy nattering with Kent like this, and Gergely pushed

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 both my profession and the fate of free democracies. Well worth seeing if you’re in the Boston area this

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 fragments knows that I’m a big fan of Simon Willison, his (also very fragmentary) posts have earn

Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted Development. He proposes a structured feedback practice that harvests learnings from AI sessions and feeds them back into the team's shared artifacts, turning individual

Modern hardware is remarkably fast, but software often fails to leverage it. Caer Sanders has found it valuable to guide their work with mechanical sympathy - the practice of creating software that is sympathetic to its underlying hardware. They

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 of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to