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

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

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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.

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