Martin Fowler

Fragments:LLM generated prose generates rejection, cancellation of Grade Hopper celebration, using AI to assist debugging unfamiliar code martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

When Kuldeep Singh took on modernizing a huge fleet of IoT sensors, he found that while his engineering principles remained largely the same, he formed a new set of Sensible Defaults for the new environment. martinfowler.com/articles/sof...

Slide design is based on choices of colors, fonts, and layouts. Sumeet demonstrates how to think about these, and why the best layout is usually a blank one. martinfowler.com/articles/nev...

A couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing. He now adds a section to the article with more detail on the craft of how we write in this style. martinfowler.com/articles/pra...

Naresh Jain compares coding agents with and without a harness. He found it made a frontier model more expensive in tokens for little gain, but make a weaker (and cheaper) model more effective. martinfowler.com/articles/are...

Fragments: walking the same path as the Krell, Ola Bini banished, interviewed at DDD Europe with Eric Evans, future of reading code, latest Google model knows less, but pretends less martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

When slides earn their place they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them - Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the resulting principles. martinfowler.com/articles/nev...

Sensible Defaults: do these practices, or do better, and be prepared to explain why you've chosen some other way. martinfowler.com/bliki/Sensib...

Fragments: agents make programming harder, creating a breakaway agent needs super-persistence, AI needs a conscience more than consciousness, theses on AI regulation martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: the risk from AI is wiring it into everything, colorful syntax highlighting impedes comprehension, what Forward Deployed Engineer should mean martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Human collaboration improves with feedback, but not obvious to do well. Anuja Karnik and Sumeet Gayathri Moghe pass on a bevy of tips, based on the principle that both praise and criticism should be seen as positive. martinfowler.com/articles/hea...

NEW POST I see AI and LLMs as bringing a mix of boons and banes, but one feeling dominates: not just are they pretending to be a person, but the kind of person I don't like. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Fragments: two worrying explanations around the RubyGems hack, agents aren't so much super-intelligent as super-persistent, Uncle Bob's harness is obviated, regulation of AI and competition with China martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storyline. martinfowler.com/articles/nev...

NEW POST A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Fragments: dealing with AI's counterfeit utility, exasperated readers of LLMs, missing Creating Passionate Users, agents lack Verum Factum, three people making key decisions on AI martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST 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 avoid these calamities, beginning with a post that questions whether a presentation is needed at all. martinfowler.com/articles/nev...

NEW POST Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Rachel's Ramblings: Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code: Or, 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 martinfowler.com/rachels-ramb...

Fragments: LLM cliché highlighter, architecture for long-horizon autonomous agents, Continuous Integration and agents, AI-generated super-viruses, prolific academic ghosts martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST In order to make AI effective, organizations need decent data. Pramod Sadalage and Prem Chandrasekaran explain how: quality foundations, semantic context, clear access, and observability martinfowler.com/articles/mak...

Fragments: lack of AI whistleblowers, saving debris from AI bubble bursting, how to decide to skip LinkedIn posts, agentic programming at Zalando, shredding US intelligence martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Rachel's Ramblings: Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern - Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software martinfowler.com/rachels-ramb...

NEW POST Jim Highsmith explains that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. martinfowler.com/articles/pra...

Fragments: introducing Rachel's Ramblings, XConf Europe, why no massive productivity gains from AI yet, visualizing election data, safety challenge from AI, impact of AI in China martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Does telling a coding agent to do TDD by itself make a difference? Or is it one of the rare examples where what's good for the human is irrelevant or bad for an agent? My thoughts and hypotheses, including observations from running a few batches with & without TDD: martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Fragments: responsibility for rogue agents, indicators of a bubble bursting, dread of AI, praise for gov.uk, getting data out of closed packages, eyes on Clacton martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

NEW POST Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

NEW POST Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that what really matters is protecting the orchestrator's context. martinfowler.com/articles/orc...

Fragments: mismatched views of AI between engineering and C-suite, comparing dotcom and AI bubbles, LLMs build it we run it, law professors prefer LLM answers, using DSLs with LLMs, the stench of LLM-speak martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

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...

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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...