@martinfowler.com
Software Design Loudmouth. Works for Thoughtworks. Also hikes, watches theater, and plays modern board games. He/him.
host of https://martinfowler.com
@martinfowler.comA couple of months ago Jim Highsmith explained how practitioners writing for each other forms a distinct style of writing. He now adds a section to the article with more detail on the craft of how we write in this style.
@martinfowler.comNaresh Jain compares coding agents with and without a harness. He found it made a frontier model more expensive in tokens for little gain, but make a weaker (and cheaper) model more effective.
@martinfowler.comFragments: walking the same path as the Krell, Ola Bini banished, interviewed at DDD Europe with Eric Evans, future of reading code, latest Google model knows less, but pretends less
@martinfowler.comIf it's common knowledge why are the vast majority of talks I watch not doing it?
@martinfowler.comWhen slides earn their place they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them - Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the resulting principles.
@martinfowler.comSensible Defaults: do these practices, or do better, and be prepared to explain why you've chosen some other way.
@martinfowler.comFragments: agents make programming harder, creating a breakaway agent needs super-persistence, AI needs a conscience more than consciousness, theses on AI regulation
@martinfowler.comI don't understand how that one can even be a thing. If you vote in favor, we do nothing; if you vote against, we blow up the world.
@martinfowler.comFragments: the risk from AI is wiring it into everything, colorful syntax highlighting impedes comprehension, what Forward Deployed Engineer should mean
@martinfowler.comNEW POST
Human collaboration improves with feedback, but not obvious to do well. Anuja Karnik and Sumeet Gayathri Moghe pass on a bevy of tips, based on the principle that both praise and criticism should be seen as positive.
@martinfowler.comNEW POST
I see AI and LLMs as bringing a mix of boons and banes, but one feeling dominates: not just are they pretending to be a person, but the kind of person I don't like.
@martinfowler.comFragments: two worrying explanations around the RubyGems hack, agents aren't so much super-intelligent as super-persistent, Uncle Bob's harness is obviated, regulation of AI and competition with China
@martinfowler.comNEW POST
Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storyline.
@martinfowler.comWe need to teach people never to use bare numbers, always declare a const 😉
@martinfowler.comI selected "recent" when I joined years ago (I don't see a "latest first"). It's full of slop nonetheless.
@martinfowler.comNEW POST
A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025.
@martinfowler.comFragments: dealing with AI's counterfeit utility, exasperated readers of LLMs, missing Creating Passionate Users, agents lack Verum Factum, three people making key decisions on AI
@martinfowler.comNEW POST
Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks. He's started to write a series of posts on how to avoid these calamities, beginning with a post that questions whether a presentation is needed at all.
@martinfowler.comA few words on a slide work well (but no sentences). I like words + arrows to indicate relationships. I think of the slides as a complementary visual channel to my words: martinfowler.com/bliki/Visual.... It's ok to turn the visuals off when there isn't something to show (just warn the AV people...)
@martinfowler.comNEW POST
Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository.
