Last month Birgitta Böckeler wrote some initial thoughts about the recently developed notion of Harness Engineering. She's been researching and thinking more about this in the weeks since and has now written a thoughtful mental model for und

AI coding assistants respond to whoever is prompting, and the quality of what they produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team standards. Rahul Garg proposes treating the instructions that govern AI interactions (generation, refact

Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me.

It’s easy to assume there are AI optimists and AI

An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and signi

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 of code review – Wikipedia will tell you as much. And sure, reviewers do catch bugs. But I thi

Conversations with AI are ephemeral, decisions made early lose attention as the conversation continues, and disappear entirely with a new session. Rahul Garg explains how Context Anchoring externalizes the decision context into a living document

Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question was:

Are AI tools shifting where engineers actually spend their time and effort? Because if they are, they’re implicitly shifting what skills

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 without a comparison of the fine to the company’s previous year revenue and profits, or valu

Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort to defensive patenting as as a shield in this asymmetric le

There's been much talk recently about how AI agents affect the workflow loops of software development. Kief Morris believes the answer is to focus on the goal of turning ideas into outcomes. The right place for us humans is to build and mana

Rahul Garg continues his series of Patterns for Reducing Friction in AI-Assisted Development. This pattern describes a structured conversation that mirrors whiteboarding with a human pair: progressive levels of design alignment before any code,

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 this overview on how organizations are currently using AI by Laura Tacho. There’s various nuggets of d

Rahul Garg has observed a frustration loop when working with AI coding assistants - lots of code generated, but needs lots of fixing. He's noticed five patterns that help improve the interaction with the LLM, and describes the first of these

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, has some advice on how to mitigate the risks.

While there is no proven safe way to run high-pe

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 earliest days, having the good fortune to be a sounding board for Eric Evans when he wrote his seminal

If you've hung around agile circles for long, you've probably heard about the concept of servant leadership, that managers should think of themselves as supporting the team, removing blocks, protecting them from the vagaries of corporate

I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat

❄ ❄

We were tired after the event, but our marketing folks forced Rachel Laycock and I to do a quick video. We’re often asked i

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 the user's email account, reads all the emails, decides which emails to ignore, drafts some emails

Birgitta Böckeler explains why OpenAI's recent write-up on Harness Engineering is a valuable framing of a key activity in AI-enabled software development. The harness includes context engineering, architectural constraints, and garbage colle

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 hoped to share more thoughts from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. I’m still worki

In Februrary 2026, Thoughtworks hosted a workshop called “The Future of Software Development” in Deer Valley Utah. While it was held in the mountains of Utah as a nod to the 25th anniversary of the writing of Manifesto for Agile Software Development, i

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 since we were operating under the Chatham House Rule, but should the sources recognize themselves and wou

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 charge with innovations in this space, but other coding assistants are quickly following suit. Powerful con

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 in an Open Space format. These kinds of events are full of ideas, which I do want to share, but I can’t

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 think is important. LLMs seem to have picked up and spread this practice widely. But most of this is se

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 using a coding agent affects internal code quality by adding a feature using the agent, and seeing what ha

My colleagues here at Thoughtworks have announced AI/works™, a platform for our work using AI-enabled software development. The platform is in its early days, and is currently intended to support Thoughtworks consultants in their client work. I’m looki

A conversation between Unmesh Joshi, Rebecca Parsons, and Martin Fowler on how LLMs help us shape the abstractions in our software. We view our challenge as building systems that survive change, requiring us to manage our cognitive

Jim Highsmith notes that many teams have turned into tribes wedded to exclusively adaptation or optimization. But he feels this misses the point that both of these are important, and we need to manage the tension between them. We can do this by

My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic favorite of 80s returns, Ethio-jazz, Guatemalan singer-guitarist, jazz-rock/Indian classical fusion, and a unique male vocalist.

more…

Anthropic report on how their AI is changing their own software development practice.

• Most usage is for debugging and helping understand existing code
• Notable increase in using it for implementing new features
• Developers

Gitanjali Venkatraman does wonderful illustrations of complex subjects (which is why I was so happy to work with her on our Expert Generalists article). She has now published the latest in her series of illustrated guides: tackling the complex topic of

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 a short post with a bunch of little, unconnected segments. These are usually a reference to something

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, ghostly scribblings, a spectre woven into our communal tapestry.

❄ ❄

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 shouldn’t take its results as definitive, but there seems enough there to make it a handy data point. Th

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’s dominated by the AI wave, with lots of blips capturing our explorations of how to use LLMs a

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 look at their new book, published today, and liked it so much I wrote a foreword.

more…

Unmesh Joshi finds LLMs to be a useful tool, but explains why their help becomes illusory if we use them to shortcut the learning loop that's an essential part of our professional practice.

more…

I’m very concerned about the security dangers of LLM-enabled browsers, as it’s just too easy for them to contain the Lethal Trifecta. For up-to-date eyes on these issues, I follow the writings of coiner of that phrase: Simon Willison. Here he examines

Agentic AI systems are amazing, but introduce equally amazing security risks. Korny Sietsma explains that their core architecture opens up security issues through what Simon Willison named the “Lethal Trifecta”. Korny goes on to talk about how t

Mathias Verraes writes about the relationship between Domains and Bounded Contexts in Domain-Driven Design. It’s a common myth that there should always be a 1:1 relationship between them, but although it’s sometimes the case, deeper mo

Birgitta Böckeler has been trying to understand one of the latest AI coding buzzword: Spec-driven development (SDD). She looked at three of the tools that label themselves as SDD tools and tried to untangle what it means, as of now.

more…

Service templates are a typical building block in the “golden paths” organisations build for their engineering teams, to make it easy to do the right thing. The templates are supposed to be the role models for all the services in the organisation, alwa

Birgitta Böckeler examines the risk assessment around when to use vibe coding, using three dimensions of risk: Probability, Impact, and Detectability

more…

I’m about to head away from looking after this site for a few weeks (part vacation, part work stuff). As I contemplate some weeks away from the daily routine, I feel an urge to share some scattered thoughts about the state of LLMs and AI.

A common enterprise problem: crucial legacy systems become “black boxes”—key to operations but opaque and risky to touch. Thiyagu Palanisamy and Chandirasekar Thiagarajan worked with a client to use AI-assisted reverse engineering to reco

The Bahmni open-source hospital management system was began over nine years ago with a front end using AngularJS and an OpenMRS REST API. Rahul Ramesh wished to convert this to use a React + TypeScript front end with an HL7 FHIR API. In explorin

CLI coding agents are a fundamentally different tool to chatbots or autocomplete tools - they're agents that can read code, run tests, and update a codebase. Ben O'Mahony explains that while commercial tools are impressive, they don'

A few weeks ago, Unmesh Joshi and I started having a conversation about how he likes to grow a language of abstractions when working with an LLM. We thought this was a conversation that others might find interesting so we turned it into an artic

Back in the days when I did live talks, one of my abilities was to finish on time, even if my talk time was cut at the last moment (perhaps due to the prior speaker running over). The key to my ability to do this was to use Expansion Joints - parts of