Fragments Nov 19
I’ve been on the road in Europe for the last couple of weeks, and while I was there Thoughtworks released volume 33 of our Technology Radar (https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar). Again it’s
Martin Fowler
Master feed of news and updates from martinfowler.com
Fragments Dec 4
Rob Bowley (https://blog.robbowley.net/2025/12/04/ai-is-still-making-code-worse-a-new-cmu-study-confirms/) summarizes a study from Carnegie Mellon looking on the impact of AI on a bunch of
Fragments Dec 11
Why does AI write like… that (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/03/magazine/chatbot-writing-style.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) (NYT, gift link). Sam Kriss delves into the quiet hum of
Writing Fragments
If you’re a regular reader of my site, you’ll have noticed that in the last few months I’ve been making a number (https://martinfowler.com/articles/20251204-frags.html) of “fragments” posts
Fragments: December 16
Gitanjali Venkatraman (https://www.linkedin.com/in/gitanjalivenkatraman/) does wonderful illustrations of complex subjects (which is why I was so happy to work with her on our Expert Generalists
Fragments: January 8
Anthropic report on how their AI is changing their own software development practice (https://www.anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-work-at-anthropic). • Most usage is for debugging
My favorite musical discoveries of 2025
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
Stop Picking Sides: Manage the Tension Between Adaptation and Optimization
Jim Highsmith notes that many teams have turned into tribes wedded to exclusively adaptation or optimization. But he feels this misses the point that both of these are important, and we
Conversation: LLMs and the what/how loop
A conversation between Unmesh Joshi, Rebecca Parsons, and Martin Fowler on how LLMs help us shape the abstractions in our software. We view our challenge as building systems that
Fragments: January 22
My colleagues here at Thoughtworks have announced AI/works™ (https://www.thoughtworks.com/ai/works), a platform for our work using AI-enabled software development. The platform is in its early
Assessing internal quality while coding with an agent
Erik Doernenburg is the maintainer of 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
Bliki: Excessive Bold
I'm increasingly seeing a lot of technical and business writing make heavy use of bold font weights, in an attempt to emphasize what the writers think is important. LLMs seem to have picked up
Fragments: February 4
I’ve spent a couple of days at a Thoughtworks-organized event in Deer Valley Utah. It was my favorite kind of event, a really great set of attendees in an Open Space