;
;

Martin Fowler

Master feed of news and updates from martinfowler.com

Website Twitter Linkedin

Fragments: September 8

Christian Catalini says we’re in a situation where we are vastly reducing the cost of generating things, but not the cost of verifying them:. T...
Posted on 8 September 2026 | 3:22 pm

Do you even need a presentation?

Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks. He's started to write a series of posts on how to...
Posted on 8 September 2026 | 1:42 pm

Bliki: Paracelsus Maxim

The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few t...
Posted on 2 September 2026 | 10:03 pm

An Accidental Blackboard

Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering pract...
Posted on 2 September 2026 | 2:45 pm

Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code

TL;DROr, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems I was o...
Posted on 2 September 2026 | 1:32 pm

Fragments: September 1

Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will ...
Posted on 1 September 2026 | 7:50 pm

Making Your Data Ready for Agentic AI

Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline their processes, save money, and juice margins. But AI's capabilities ...
Posted on 27 August 2026 | 1:11 pm

Fragments: August 24

I was listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Helen Toner about the recent OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and the subsequent discovery that there wer...
Posted on 24 August 2026 | 3:29 pm

Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern

TL;DRWhy building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last s...
Posted on 19 August 2026 | 6:30 pm

Practitioner Voice: The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet

Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. ...
Posted on 19 August 2026 | 6:15 pm

Fragments: August 18

Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an exa...
Posted on 18 August 2026 | 3:04 pm

TDD inside the agent loop - theater or actual value?

My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents ...
Posted on 11 August 2026 | 11:39 am

Fragments: August 4

There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face. This prompted Anthropic to check what their models...
Posted on 4 August 2026 | 12:08 pm

The Conductor Developer

TL;DRWhy I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software develo...
Posted on 31 July 2026 | 1:48 pm

The Economic Benefit of Refactoring

Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be ...
Posted on 30 July 2026 | 1:04 pm

The Orchestrator's Tax

Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the ...
Posted on 28 July 2026 | 1:10 pm

Why I’m Writing Rachel’s Ramblings

TL;DRI have ideas. I haven’t been writing them. That’s about to change. I promise… myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about talent. Actually, I’ve b...
Posted on 28 July 2026 | 12:32 pm

Fragments: July 21

With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thought...
Posted on 21 July 2026 | 1:13 pm

The Archaeologist’s Copilot

When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge fa...
Posted on 16 July 2026 | 1:25 pm

DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs

LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Abstractions and ...
Posted on 14 July 2026 | 12:51 pm

Fragments: July 13

Some more of my notes from Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. When we had our first retreat in Utah early this year, nobody had ...
Posted on 13 July 2026 | 12:51 pm

Experiences with local models for coding

Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and...
Posted on 8 July 2026 | 11:57 am

Viability of local models for coding

Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors ...
Posted on 7 July 2026 | 12:34 pm

Fragments: July 6

Last week, Thoughtworks ran a second Future of Software Development Retreat, this time in Europe. As with the previous event, I’ll be sharing some ...
Posted on 6 July 2026 | 12:53 pm

Fragments: June 16

“Prag Dave” Thomas (co-author of the outstanding “Pragmatic Programmer”) has loved programming since he was young. Programming was how I could ...
Posted on 16 June 2026 | 12:44 pm

Building Reliable Agentic AI Systems

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical resear...
Posted on 16 June 2026 | 12:11 pm

Fragments: June 2

Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs. Would you measure lines of ...
Posted on 2 June 2026 | 3:21 pm

The test suite as a regression sensor

Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusi...
Posted on 27 May 2026 | 3:01 pm

The VibeSec Reckoning

Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security ...
Posted on 27 May 2026 | 2:03 pm

Bliki: Vibe Coding

Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without ...
Posted on 21 May 2026 | 11:49 am