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Martin Fowler

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Fragments: December 16

Gitanjali Venkatraman does wonderful illustrations of complex subjects (which is why I was so happy to work with her on our Expert Generalists arti...
Posted on 16 December 2025 | 3:14 pm

Writing Fragments

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 ...
Posted on 16 December 2025 | 3:06 pm

Fragments Dec 11

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 t...
Posted on 11 December 2025 | 3:17 pm

Fragments Dec 4

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...
Posted on 4 December 2025 | 3:59 pm

Fragments Nov 19

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. Agai...
Posted on 19 November 2025 | 7:02 pm

My Foreword to "Frictionless"

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...
Posted on 18 November 2025 | 5:19 pm

The Learning Loop and LLMs

Unmesh Joshi finds LLMs to be a useful tool, but explains why their help becomes illusory if we use them to shortcut the learning loo...
Posted on 4 November 2025 | 2:14 pm

Fragments Nov 3

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-dat...
Posted on 4 November 2025 | 12:42 am

Agentic AI and Security

Agentic AI systems are amazing, but introduce equally amazing security risks. Korny Sietsma explains that their core architecture ope...
Posted on 28 October 2025 | 1:20 pm

Fragments and Links

Mathias Verraes writes about the relationship between Domains and Bounded Contexts in Domain-Driven Design. It’s a common myth that there should al...
Posted on 21 October 2025 | 3:02 pm

Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl

Birgitta Böckeler has been trying to understand one of the latest AI coding buzzword: Spec-driven development (SDD). She looked at th...
Posted on 15 October 2025 | 12:33 pm

Anchoring AI to a reference application

Service templates are a typical building block in the “golden paths” organisations build for their engineering teams, to make it easy to do...
Posted on 25 September 2025 | 9:57 am

To vibe or not to vibe

Birgitta Böckeler examines the risk assessment around when to use vibe coding, using three dimensions of risk: Probability, Impact, a...
Posted on 23 September 2025 | 7:53 am

Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development

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 dai...
Posted on 28 August 2025 | 2:10 pm

From Black Box to Blueprint

A common enterprise problem: crucial legacy systems become “black boxes”—key to operations but opaque and risky to touch. Thiyagu Pal...
Posted on 28 August 2025 | 11:24 am

Research, Review, Rebuild: Intelligent Modernisation with MCP and Strategic Prompting

The Bahmni open-source hospital management system was began over nine years ago with a front end using AngularJS and an OpenMRS REST API. ...
Posted on 27 August 2025 | 2:15 pm

Building your own CLI Coding Agent with Pydantic-AI

CLI coding agents are a fundamentally different tool to chatbots or autocomplete tools - they're agents that can read code, run tests, and ...
Posted on 27 August 2025 | 11:50 am

Chatting with Unmesh about building language with LLMs

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 ...
Posted on 26 August 2025 | 1:26 pm

Bliki: Expansion Joints

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 t...
Posted on 18 August 2025 | 4:00 am

Team OKRs in Action

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...
Posted on 13 August 2025 | 2:16 pm

Impact Intelligence, addressing common objections

Sriram Narayan concludes his article in impact intelligence by addressing five common objections to this activity, including slowing ...
Posted on 12 August 2025 | 1:02 pm

Quick but worthwhile links

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 losin...
Posted on 7 August 2025 | 1:21 pm

Actions to improve impact intelligence

Sriram Narayan continues his article on impact intelligence by outlining five actions that can be done to improve impact intelligence...
Posted on 7 August 2025 | 1:20 pm

The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence

The productivity of knowledge workers is hard to quantify and often decoupled from direct business outcomes. The lack of understanding lead...
Posted on 6 August 2025 | 1:23 pm

How far can we push AI autonomy in code generation?

Birgitta Böckeler reports on a series of experiments we did to explore how far Generative AI can currently be pushed toward autonomou...
Posted on 5 August 2025 | 1:53 pm

Partner with the AI, throw away the code

Matteo Vaccari shows why the common metric of AI code acceptance has big hole. An LLM can be helpful even if you throw away its code....
Posted on 31 July 2025 | 2:16 pm

Who is LLM

It's become a common habit for developers to give Large Language Models (LLMs) a persona when working with them. I describe four of them, a ...
Posted on 22 July 2025 | 8:08 am

Generative AI in software and essaying

Korny Sietsma has a great example of how using an LLM for coding is very helpful but with limitations… and a thoughtful general essay on why the h...
Posted on 21 July 2025 | 6:58 pm

Three worthwhile articles yesterday

Three articles I enjoyed yesterday: Stephen O’Grady talks about how Gen AI tools break two common constants with developer tools: they are willing...
Posted on 10 July 2025 | 2:58 pm

I still care about the code

Even with LLMs, Birgitta Böckeler still cares about the code: “LLMs are NOT compilers, interpreters, transpilers or assemblers of nat...
Posted on 9 July 2025 | 2:33 pm