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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

OKRs have become a popular way to connect strategy with execution in large organizations. But when they are set in a top‑down cascade, they often lose their meaning. Teams receive objectives they didn’t help create, and the result is weak commitment an

Sriram Narayan concludes his article in impact intelligence by addressing five common objections to this activity, including slowing down, lack of agility and collaboration, and the unpredictability of innovation.

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Abi Noda observes

Just met with a 2000+ eng company. Their developers are saving 2+ hours per week thanks to Copilot.

But they’re also losing:

• 3 hrs per week due to slow builds
• 4 hrs per week on dev

Sriram Narayan continues his article on impact intelligence by outlining five actions that can be done to improve impact intelligence: introduce robust demand management, pay down measurement debt introduce impact validation, offer your CFO/COO

The productivity of knowledge workers is hard to quantify and often decoupled from direct business outcomes. The lack of understanding leads to many initiatives, bloated tech spend, and ill-chosen efforts to improve this productivity. Sriram Narayan

Birgitta Böckeler reports on a series of experiments we did to explore how far Generative AI can currently be pushed toward autonomously developing high-quality, up-to-date software without human intervention. As a test case, we created an agent