NEW POST Nik Malykhin needed to run a Java 1.5 codebase on today's hardware. His initial try to use LLMs wasn't helpful, but he made progress when he guided the process with careful steps. martinfowler.com/articles/arc...

NEW POST LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Unmesh Joshi shares his experience using abstractions and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to provide a strong harness to guide an LLM. martinfowler.com/articles/llm...

Fragments: FOSD discussions on harness engineering, self-hosting models, grand narrative, and bringing rocks. Saving money with fable, bleak future for developer education, does electron have a future, interactional and contributory expertise. martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

I added an appendix to my article on "Maintainability sensors for coding agents", about the little sidecar application I built to run all the computational sensors I had next to the agent, and give both human and agent the ability to monitor their state martinfowler.com/articles/sen...

NEW POST After setting out her factors of viability, @birgitta410.bsky.social now reports on her experiences with local LLMs for programming. She compares them with two standard tasks and tries the best LLM in day-to-day use martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that influence how viable they are for the job. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Fragments: Second future of software development retreat, ethics of working with AI, censorship via DMCA, reacting to the high cost of tokens, a radical document in 1776 martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST We've used AI with Bayer to help pharmaceutical researchers query decades of information buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes the evolution from keyword-based search to a research assistant that can draft regulatory reports martinfowler.com/articles/rel...

Fragments: enjoying programming with LLMs, four types of LLM conversation, the crevasse between AI enthusiasts and skeptics, AI companies get product/market fit, the need for decentralization martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: Dodgy metrics for AI usage, history of tech removing jobs, benchmarking closed and open models, LLMs multiply existing cruft, AI slop driving us crazy, I am the Global Interpreter Lock for agents martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments:GOTO chat with Kent Beck, using AI to help restructure a gnarly codebase, open-source and security, cognitive endurance, Gen Z future with AI, impact of AI on jobs, fumbling AI regulation martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW § @birgitta410.bsky.social 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. martinfowler.com/articles/sen...

NEW POST Four of my colleagues share their experiences in applying good security practices to vibe coding. martinfowler.com/articles/vib...

NEW § @birgitta410.bsky.social adds exploration of three sensors for static code analysis, with mixed results. Computational sensors alone cannot help us much, AI is needed to add semantic interpretation, and consider trade-offs. martinfowler.com/articles/sen...

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social begins an article about her experiences with sensors in an agent harness. This first part looks at static analysis with basic code linting. martinfowler.com/articles/sen...

Fragments: thoughts from a software development retreat, would I be a writer without text editors, use LLMs as functions, don't use LLM skills, is the future of everything lies? martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST When I need to feed an LLM a lot of context, I can write it myself, or I can get an LLM to interview me for it. martinfowler.com/bliki/Interr...

NEW POST Will there be source code in the future? To wrestle with this, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: instructions to a machine and a conceptual model of the problem domain. martinfowler.com/articles/wha...

The Democratic Establishment is trying to rig a primary in Massachusetts. And they're using AI money to help. Stand up to this by going to bethfordemocracy.com and donating to help us reboot democracy

Fragments: open-source framework for prompting patterns, musician sues google for defamation, apple is thinking differently about AI spending, running LLMs locally, will The Genie be caught in the tar pit? martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: updated guide on AI coding, video on harness engineering, how long should a function be, the problems of Software Brain and why AI is unpopular martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Thoughtworks internal IT use a workflow for agentic programming called Structured-Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD). Wei Zhang and Jessie Jie Xia describe how this works with a simple example with details in a github project. martinfowler.com/articles/str...

Fragments: 34th Thoughtworks Technology Radar, what happens when developers don't read the LLM's code, DirectFile and tech in large organizations martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

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...