NEW POST
Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with practical constraints startups face, led him to resort to defensive patenting as as a shield in this asymmetric legal environment.
martinfowler.com/articles/pat...
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There's been much talk about how AI agents affect the workflow loops of software development. @kief.com focuses on the goal of turning ideas into outcomes by building and managing the working loop, rather than leaving the agents to it or micromanaging.
martinfowler.com/articles/exp...
my immediate reaction is "how do you measure design quality?"
But the feedback I'm hearing is that iff you are careful with your prompting, you can get decent code out of them these days.
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Rahul Garg uses a structured conversation with an AI agent that mirrors whiteboarding with a human pair: progressive levels of design alignment before any code, reducing cognitive load, and catching misunderstandings at the cheapest possible moment.
martinfowler.com/articles/red...
And if you enjoy podcasts, do have a listen to the 99% invisible series on The Power Broker. It's a great accompaniment to the book
Yes, got through the LBJ ones. I enjoyed how #3 reveled in his senate maneuvers, particularly the passing of the, admittedly hollow, civil rights act. The fourth has great portraits of the Kennedys and his description of the day of assassination is totally gripping.
My reading this year was dominated by Robert Caro. The books are huge, but so worth it. martinfowler.com/articles/202...
Fragments: how organizations are using AI, reflections from the Utah retreat, agentic engineering patterns, inserting friction for security, training biological neural networks
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
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Rahul Garg sees a frustration loop when working with AI and identified five patterns to help. Here's the first: priming the LLM with knowledge about the codebase and preferred coding patterns.
martinfowler.com/articles/red...
Fragments: security with OpenClaw, impressions from Pragmatic Summit, era of highly bespoke software, life-size pocket map
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
Fragments: LLMs make our days harder, an LLM reacts badly to a rejected pull request, the Promptware Kill Chain, horror and elation trying Claude Code for two weeks, Free Speech Poseurs' silence to real threats
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
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The concept of Servant Leadership has never quite sat properly with me, because it's essentially gaslighting. Recently I came across Host Leadership as a better framing.
martinfowler.com/bliki/HostLe...
Fragments: Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
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I've heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. I think this is extremely risky
martinfowler.com/bliki/Agenti...
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@birgitta410.bsky.social explains why OpenAI's recent write-up on "Harness Engineering" is a valuable framing of a key part of AI-enabled software dev. Harness has context engineering, architectural constraints, and garbage collection of the code base.
martinfowler.com/articles/exp...
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Fragments: the future of senior developers, junior developers, more on cognitive debt, DevEx versus AgentEx, the role of IDEs, consequences of task switching in supervisory programming
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
fragments: the consequences of absolute skepticism, cognitive debt with AI, will AI remove fun of programming, the future of source code, how to survive AI contributions to open source, explaining transformers to 12/62-year-olds
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
Thanks for noticing the error, I've let Birgitta know and I'll post a fix when I have it,
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Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of modern LLM tools. @birgitta410.bsky.social explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example.
martinfowler.com/articles/exp...
Fragments: teaching your pair is learning, use LLMs as a GPS rather than a destination, future libraries may be specs, and LLMs of the future funded by advertising
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
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These days I'm seeing a lot of bold fonts, especially in LLM-written prose. But when bold is used frequently, it quickly becomes ineffective.
martinfowler.com/bliki/Excess...
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Erik Doernenburg maintains CCMenu: a Mac application that shows the status of CI/CD builds in the Mac menu bar. He assesses how using a coding agent affects internal code quality by adding a feature using the agent, and seeing what happens to the code.
martinfowler.com/articles/exp...
Fragments: Thoughtworks launches AI/works™, electricity consumption of LLMs, how LLMs shift where we put discipline, and thoughts on The Situation in Minnesota
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
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I had a conversation with Unmesh Joshi, and Rebecca Parsons where we talked about the feedback loop between the "what" and "how" in software development, and the role LLMs play in it.
martinfowler.com/articles/con...
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Jim Highsmith sees teams turning into tribes wedded to adaptation or optimization - but we should manage the tension between them by blending modes of explore and exploit, based on uncertainty, risk, cost of change, & evidence threshold.
martinfowler.com/articles/sto...
My favorite albums from last year. Balkan brass, an acoustic favorite of 80s returns, Ethio-jazz, Guatemalan singer-guitarist, jazz-rock/Indian classical fusion, and a unique male vocalist.
martinfowler.com/articles/202...
Fragments: How AI is changing Anthropic's internal development, a detailed account of using LLM to program a knowledge management tool, obvious-easy-possible buckets for interface design, specifications cannot be complete, and lightweight tools to work with LLMs
martinfowler.com/fragments/20...
I continue to enjoy playing board games: here's my summary of 2025 gaming on my BGG blog.
boardgamegeek.com/blog/13064/b...
Two legends confirmed for The Pragmatic Summit: Martin Fowler (@martinfowler.com) and Kent Beck (@kentbeck.com)
We'll talk about what past booms+busts taught them, and their take on AI+software engineering: what they see working, and what not so much
11 Feb, SF: www.pragmaticsummit.com
Tonight at around 1815 EDT, we are featuring #Indonesia again!
With the 3rd Edition delivering, now seemed a great time to revisit the all-timer, but now, in green & 4k!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkI5...
See y’all tonight!
@jeroendoumen.bsky.social
@martinfowler.com
