Fragments: April 2
As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey
Martin Fowler
Master feed of news and updates from martinfowler.com
Harness engineering for coding agent users
Last month Birgitta Böckeler wrote some initial thoughts about the recently developed notion of Harness Engineering. She's been researching and thinking more about this in the weeks
Encoding Team Standards
AI coding assistants respond to whoever is prompting, and the quality of what they produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team standards. Rahul Garg proposes treating the
Fragments: March 26
Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users (https://www.anthropic.com/features/81k-interviews) to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it,
Bliki: Architecture Decision Record
An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and
Fragments: March 19
David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck (https://www.davidpoll.com/2026/02/code-review-is-not-about-catching-bugs/) To be fair, finding defects
Context Anchoring
Conversations with AI are ephemeral, decisions made early lose attention as the conversation continues, and disappear entirely with a new session. Rahul Garg explains how Context
Fragments: March 16
Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question (https://annievella.com/posts/the-middle-loop/) was: Are AI tools shifting where engineers
Fragments: March 10
Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/04/california-tech-gofan-fine) I agree with Brian Marick’s response
Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism
Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with the practical constraints faced by startups, led him to resort
Humans and Agents in Software Engineering Loops
There's been much talk recently about how AI agents affect the workflow loops of software development. Kief Morris believes the answer is to focus on the goal of turning ideas into
Design-First Collaboration
Rahul Garg continues his series of Patterns for Reducing Friction in AI-Assisted Development. This pattern describes a structured conversation that mirrors whiteboarding with a human
Fragments: February 25
I don’t tend to post links to videos here, as I can’t stand watching videos to learn about things (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/AvoidingVideo.html). But some talks are worth a watch, and I do
Knowledge Priming
Rahul Garg has observed a frustration loop when working with AI coding assistants - lots of code generated, but needs lots of fixing. He's noticed five patterns that help improve
Fragments: February 23
Do you want to run OpenClaw? It may be fascinating, but it also raises significant security dangers. Jim Gumbley, one of my go-to sources on security, has some advice on how to mitigate the risks.
Fragments: February 19
I try to limit my time on stage these days, but one exception this year is at DDD Europe (https://2026.dddeurope.com/blog/martin-fowler-to-keynote-at-ddd-europe-2026/). I’ve been involved in
Bliki: Host Leadership
If you've hung around agile circles for long, you've probably heard about the concept of servant leadership, that managers should think of themselves as supporting the team, removing blocks,
Fragments: February 18
I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat (https://martinfowler.com/bliki/FutureOfSoftwareDevelopment.html) ❄
Bliki: Agentic Email
I've heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. The LLM has access to the user's email account, reads all the emails,
Harness Engineering
Birgitta Böckeler explains why OpenAI's recent write-up on Harness Engineering is a valuable framing of a key activity in AI-enabled software development. The harness includes context