Fragments: pragmatic summit video with Kent and Gergely, virtue of laziness, TDD and prompts, inspiration from Dark Star martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

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. Worth seeing if you’re in the Boston area this month. www.centralsquaretheater.org/shows/breaki...

Why are the “age verification” laws bad? Have you ever tried to use a website and been stumped by a captcha? Maybe it asked you to pick every square with a bicycle, but you aren’t sure if that tiny bit of tire counts. Then you have to read numbers: is that a 7 or a 1? At some point, you give up.

Fragments: two podcasts, a worryingly well-done supply-chain attack, framework for tech documentation, and a particularly thoughtful AI coding experience martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted Development with a structured practice that feeds back learnings from AI sessions into the team's shared artifacts, turning individual experience into collective improvement. martinfowler.com/articles/red...

NEW POST Modern hardware is fast, but software often fails to leverage it. @withcaer.com guides their work with mechanical sympathy. They distill this into principles: predictable memory access, awareness of cache lines, single-writer, natural batching martinfowler.com/articles/mec...

Fragments: three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expensive if agents make coding free, and the future of source code martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social wrote some initial thoughts about Harness Engineering last month. Since then she's been researching more and has now written a thoughtful mental model for understanding the topic. martinfowler.com/articles/har...

NEW POST The quality of what AI coding assistants produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team standards. Rahul Garg proposes treating such instructions as infrastructure: versioned, reviewed, and shared artifacts. martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Fragments: 80,000 people's opinion on AI, fixing the common gap in spec-driven development, weakening defenses against covert attacks on the U.S. martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST ADRs are short documents that capture a decision, structured into logs that reveal a history of architectural thinking for a product martinfowler.com/bliki/Archit...

Fragments: code review isn't just catching bugs, what role for observability in agentic programming, what we lose with GPS over maps martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST 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. martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Fragments: supervisory engineering, 2 sets of 8 levels, generating code to an architecture, perils of detecting AI-aided writing, should humans review code? martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: reporting fines, engaging with gen AI, experience engineering, watching the ralph loop, migrating COBOL martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with practical constraints startups face, led him to resort to defensive patenting as as a shield in this asymmetric legal environment. martinfowler.com/articles/pat...

NEW POST There's been much talk about how AI agents affect the workflow loops of software development. @kief.com focuses on the goal of turning ideas into outcomes by building and managing the working loop, rather than leaving the agents to it or micromanaging. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

NEW POST Rahul Garg uses a structured conversation with an AI agent that mirrors whiteboarding with a human pair: progressive levels of design alignment before any code, reducing cognitive load, and catching misunderstandings at the cheapest possible moment. martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Fragments: how organizations are using AI, reflections from the Utah retreat, agentic engineering patterns, inserting friction for security, training biological neural networks martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Rahul Garg sees a frustration loop when working with AI and identified five patterns to help. Here's the first: priming the LLM with knowledge about the codebase and preferred coding patterns. martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Fragments: security with OpenClaw, impressions from Pragmatic Summit, era of highly bespoke software, life-size pocket map martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: LLMs make our days harder, an LLM reacts badly to a rejected pull request, the Promptware Kill Chain, horror and elation trying Claude Code for two weeks, Free Speech Poseurs' silence to real threats martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST The concept of Servant Leadership has never quite sat properly with me, because it's essentially gaslighting. Recently I came across Host Leadership as a better framing. martinfowler.com/bliki/HostLe...

Fragments: Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST I've heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. I think this is extremely risky martinfowler.com/bliki/Agenti...

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social explains why OpenAI's recent write-up on "Harness Engineering" is a valuable framing of a key part of AI-enabled software dev. Harness has context engineering, architectural constraints, and garbage collection of the code base. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

NEW POST Fragments: the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

fragments: the consequences of absolute skepticism, cognitive debt with AI, will AI remove fun of programming, the future of source code, how to survive AI contributions to open source, explaining transformers to 12/62-year-olds martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of modern LLM tools. @birgitta410.bsky.social explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Fragments: teaching your pair is learning, use LLMs as a GPS rather than a destination, future libraries may be specs, and LLMs of the future funded by advertising martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST These days I'm seeing a lot of bold fonts, especially in LLM-written prose. But when bold is used frequently, it quickly becomes ineffective. martinfowler.com/bliki/Excess...

NEW POST Erik Doernenburg maintains 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 happens to the code. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Fragments: Thoughtworks launches AI/works™, electricity consumption of LLMs, how LLMs shift where we put discipline, and thoughts on The Situation in Minnesota martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST I had a conversation with Unmesh Joshi, and Rebecca Parsons where we talked about the feedback loop between the "what" and "how" in software development, and the role LLMs play in it. martinfowler.com/articles/con...

NEW POST Jim Highsmith sees teams turning into tribes wedded to adaptation or optimization - but we should manage the tension between them by blending modes of explore and exploit, based on uncertainty, risk, cost of change, & evidence threshold. martinfowler.com/articles/sto...

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. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Fragments: How AI is changing Anthropic's internal development, a detailed account of using LLM to program a knowledge management tool, obvious-easy-possible buckets for interface design, specifications cannot be complete, and lightweight tools to work with LLMs martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

I continue to enjoy playing board games: here's my summary of 2025 gaming on my BGG blog. boardgamegeek.com/blog/13064/b...

Two legends confirmed for The Pragmatic Summit: Martin Fowler (@martinfowler.com) and Kent Beck (@kentbeck.com) We'll talk about what past booms+busts taught them, and their take on AI+software engineering: what they see working, and what not so much 11 Feb, SF: www.pragmaticsummit.com

Tonight at around 1815 EDT, we are featuring #Indonesia again! With the 3rd Edition delivering, now seemed a great time to revisit the all-timer, but now, in green & 4k! www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkI5... See y’all tonight! @jeroendoumen.bsky.social @martinfowler.com

Fragments: Illustrated guide to mainframe modernization, what the second value of code reviews means for LLMs, LLMs write and then port an HTML parser martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: The nature of AI's prose, what makes good tests, EUs fines on X aren't about free speech, and the perils of being a reverse-centaur martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Some fragments on AI, its impact on maintainability, the dangers from its jailbreaking, developer workflows - and how it can be an ally against Parkinson's disease martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Thoughtworks Radar, on a podcast with @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com , another way at looking at feature/time curves, and the return of @heavycardboard.bsky.social martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Tomorrow - pod episode with @martinfowler.com coming!

Today, @nicolefv.bsky.social and Abi Noda's new book "Frictionless" is officially published. I liked it enough to write a foreword for it: martinfowler.com/articles/fri...

Unmesh Joshi finds LLMs to be a useful tool, but explains why their help becomes illusory if they shortcut the essential learning loop of our professional practice. martinfowler.com/articles/llm...

Concerns about LLM-enabled browsers, the different perspectives on AI-Coding, and looking back at the loss of an iconic helmet. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

There's got to be a massive chance of public backlash against all this AI assistant stuff It's totally being forced down people's throats and it barely works yet Those pushing it have a massive megaphone But one killerapp of capitalism is people vote with their wallets

NEW POST Agentic AI systems are amazing, but so are the security issues they raise. Korny has written a great primer on the problem - and what we can do to mitigate it.