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 things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: rea

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

TL;DR 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 I was on a panel recently with Brian Houck from DX at Code

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 flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a

Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline their processes, save money, and juice margins. But AI's capabilities are founded on the data that AI accesses, and for

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 were swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned a

TL;DR Why 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 six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’

Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributo

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 example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is tha

My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckel

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 were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, dis

TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly

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 refact

Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the orchestrator's context is competing for its attention

TL;DR I 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 been thinking a lot about thinking. And writing. Or m

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 Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available. They ha

When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing Nik Malykhin when he needed to run a Java 1.

Unmesh Joshi illustrates how LLMs work very effectively with Domain-Specific Languages (DSL). The constrained nature of DSLs make it easier for the LLM to build code based on natural langu

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 heard of Harness Engineering. This time we had a whole

Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local models for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day us