Fragments: February 13
I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not has as much time as I’d hoped to share more thoughts from the
Martin Fowler
Master feed of news and updates from martinfowler.com
Fragments: February 9
Some more thoughts from last week’s open space gathering on the future of software development in the age of AI. I haven’t attributed any comments since we were operating under the Chatham House
Context Engineering for Coding Agents
The number of options we have to configure and enrich a coding agent’s context has exploded over the past few months. Claude Code is leading the charge with innovations in this space,
Quick but worthwhile links
Abi Noda observes (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7358495366930976769/) Just met with a 2000+ eng company. Their developers are saving 2+ hours per week thanks to Copilot.
Impact Intelligence, addressing common objections
Sriram Narayan concludes his article in impact intelligence by addressing five common objections to this activity, including slowing down, lack of agility and collaboration, and the
Team OKRs in Action
OKRs have become a popular way to connect strategy with execution in large organizations. But when they are set in a top‑down cascade, they often lose their meaning. Teams receive
Bliki: Expansion Joints
Back in the days when I did live talks, one of my abilities was to finish on time, even if my talk time was cut at the last moment (perhaps due to the prior speaker running over). The key to my
Chatting with Unmesh about building language with LLMs
A few weeks ago, Unmesh Joshi and I started having a conversation about how he likes to grow a language of abstractions when working with an LLM. We thought this was a conversation that
Building your own CLI Coding Agent with Pydantic-AI
CLI coding agents are a fundamentally different tool to chatbots or autocomplete tools - they're agents that can read code, run tests, and update a codebase. Ben O'Mahony explains that
Research, Review, Rebuild: Intelligent Modernisation with MCP and Strategic Prompting
The Bahmni open-source hospital management system was began over nine years ago with a front end using AngularJS and an OpenMRS REST API. Rahul Ramesh wished to convert this to use a
From Black Box to Blueprint
A common enterprise problem: crucial legacy systems become “black boxes”—key to operations but opaque and risky to touch. Thiyagu Palanisamy and Chandirasekar Thiagarajan worked
Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development
I’m about to head away from looking after this site for a few weeks (part vacation, part work stuff). As I contemplate some weeks away from the daily routine, I feel an urge to share some scattered
To vibe or not to vibe
Birgitta Böckeler examines the risk assessment around when to use vibe coding, using three dimensions of risk: Probability, Impact, and Detectability more…
Anchoring AI to a reference application
Service templates are a typical building block in the “golden paths” organisations build for their engineering teams, to make it easy to do the right thing. The templates are supposed
Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl
Birgitta Böckeler has been trying to understand one of the latest AI coding buzzword: Spec-driven development (SDD). She looked at three of the tools that label themselves as SDD tools
Fragments and Links
Mathias Verraes writes about the relationship between Domains and Bounded Contexts (https://verraes.net/2025/08/domain-and-bounded-contexts-dont-map-one-on-one/) in Domain-Driven Design. It’s a
Agentic AI and Security
Agentic AI systems are amazing, but introduce equally amazing security risks. Korny Sietsma explains that their core architecture opens up security issues through what Simon Willison
Fragments Nov 3
I’m very concerned about the security dangers of LLM-enabled browsers, as it’s just too easy for them to contain the Lethal Trifecta (https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/openai-ciso-on-atlas/).
The Learning Loop and LLMs
Unmesh Joshi finds LLMs to be a useful tool, but explains why their help becomes illusory if we use them to shortcut the learning loop that's an essential part of our professional
My Foreword to "Frictionless"
I find most writing on software productivity to be twaddle, but Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda are notable exceptions. I had a chance to take a look at their new book, published today, and