martinfowler.comadded August 2026
Martin Fowlerby Rachel Laycock (rlaycock@thoughtworks.com)4d ago
Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern 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...
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)4d ago
Practitioner Voice The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet Effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)6d ago
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 example for the rest of the...
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)13d ago
TDD inside the agent loop - theater or actual value? The TDD (test-driven development) workflow can be used with AI-augmented coding in multiple ways: - Human writes the tests: A human defines the...
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)20d ago
Fragments: August 4 There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face.
Martin Fowlerby Rachel Laycock (rlaycock@thoughtworks.com)24d ago
The Conductor Developer TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)25d ago
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring As part of getting to grips with the new world of agentic engineering, I built an application to support my work.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)27d ago
The Orchestrator's Tax Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but that's not what matters most in long-running multi-agent work.
Martin Fowlerby Rachel Laycock (rlaycock@thoughtworks.com)27d ago
Why I’m Writing Rachel’s Ramblings 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.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)21 Jul 2026
Fragments: July 21 With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)16 Jul 2026
The Archaeologist’s Copilot Restoration of a 20-year-old Java “Big Ball of Mud” using AI and Docker This article explains the approach I used to modernize a Java 1.5 codebase that no longer built...
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)14 Jul 2026
DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)13 Jul 2026
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 heard of Harness Engineering.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)8 Jul 2026
Experiences with local models for coding This is the second memo where I describe my recent experiences on running small models locally on my developer machine for agentic coding.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)7 Jul 2026
Viability of local models for coding Until recently I hadn't tried running models locally for quite a while, the disappointment had just always been too high when I did it.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)6 Jul 2026
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 fragmentary thoughts on this.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)16 Jun 2026
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 express myself. I wasn’t an artist.
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)2 Jun 2026
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 code generated, or tickets closed?
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)27 May 2026
Fragments: May 27 At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers...
Martin Fowlerby Martin Fowler (martin@martinfowler.com)27 May 2026
Maintainability sensors for coding agents In a recent article about harness engineering for coding agent users, I laid out a mental model for expanding a coding agent harness: a system of guides...
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