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Martin Fowler

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When Software Meets Hardware

When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh descr...
Posted on 15 October 2026 | 1:25 pm

Build your slide template

Building a slide template starts with three foundational choices — colours, fonts and layouts. Sumeet Gayathri Moghe covers the basic...
Posted on 14 October 2026 | 2:20 pm

The Craft of Practitioner Voice

A couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing. He now adds ...
Posted on 13 October 2026 | 2:06 pm

Are Harnesses Worth the Cost?

Naresh Jain compares coding agents building the same API service with and without a behavioral harness. A frontier model, GPT-6 Sol, ...
Posted on 13 October 2026 | 1:35 pm

Fragments: October 4

In response to my last fragments (probably the bit about us worrying if LLMs have consciousness when we when we should be wondering why they don’t ...
Posted on 5 October 2026 | 4:28 am

Principles for effective slides

Not every presentation needs slides, but when they earn their place, they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than...
Posted on 30 September 2026 | 2:14 pm

Bliki: Sensible Default

A Sensible Default is a practice that, absent some overriding context, should be used when carrying out a certain kind of task. In software dev...
Posted on 29 September 2026 | 1:43 pm

Fragments: September 29

Simon Willison: The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We...
Posted on 29 September 2026 | 12:41 pm

Fragments: September 24

Rob Bowley is “flipping tables in his head” with anger at the current media coverage of the danger of AI killing us all The risk I’m worried ab...
Posted on 24 September 2026 | 3:35 pm

Healthy Feedback

Human collaboration, like most things, improves with feedback. But it's not obvious how to make feedback effective. Anuja Karnik and ...
Posted on 24 September 2026 | 2:10 pm

I don't like LLMs

I have a lot of mixed feelings about AI and LLM technology. I’m fascinated by its effect on our profession, excited by the potential gains in produ...
Posted on 17 September 2026 | 1:50 pm

Fragments: September 16

Reports of agentic hacking continue, in this case it happened back in May and it seems OpenAI did not disclose that they were responsible. Simon Wi...
Posted on 16 September 2026 | 8:05 pm

Nail the Narrative

Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises...
Posted on 15 September 2026 | 3:11 pm

Social Media Engagement: summer 2026

A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service...
Posted on 9 September 2026 | 4:21 pm

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