Modern hardware is remarkably fast, but software often fails to leverage it. Caer Sanders has found it valuable to guide his work with mechanical sympathy - the practice of creating software that is sympathetic to its underlying hardware. He distills this practice into everyday principles: predictab...

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 thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health: Technica...

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 since and has now written a thoughtful mental model for understanding harness engineering that we think will help peop...

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 instructions that govern AI interactions (generation, refactoring, security, review) as infrastructure: versioned, ...

Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me. It’s easy to assume there are AI optimists and AI pessimists, divided into separate camps. But what we ac...

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 contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications. They should not be modifie...

David Poll points out the flawed premise of the argument that code review is a bottleneck To be fair, finding defects has always been listed as a goal of code review – Wikipedia will tell you as much. And sure, reviewers do catch bugs. But I think that framing dramatically overstates the bug-catchin...

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 Anchoring externalizes the decision context into a living document. more…

Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question was: Are AI tools shifting where engineers actually spend their time and effort? Because if they are, they’re implicitly shifting what skills we practice and, ultimately, the definition of the role...

Tech firm fined $1.1m by California for selling high-school students’ data I agree with Brian Marick’s response No such story should be published without a comparison of the fine to the company’s previous year revenue and profits, or valuation of last funding round. (I could only find a valuation of...

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 to defensive patenting as as a shield in this asymmetric legal environment. more…

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 outcomes. The right place for us humans is to build and manage the working loop rather than either leaving the agents t...

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 pair: progressive levels of design alignment before any code, reducing cognitive load, and catching misunderstandings...

I don’t tend to post links to videos here, as I can’t stand watching videos to learn about things. But some talks are worth a watch, and I do suggest this overview on how organizations are currently using AI by Laura Tacho. There’s various nuggets of data from her work with DX: 92.6% of devs are usi...

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 the interaction with the LLM, and describes the first of these: priming the LLM with knowledge about the codebase and pre...

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. While there is no proven safe way to run high-permissioned agents today, there are practical patterns t...

I try to limit my time on stage these days, but one exception this year is at DDD Europe. I’ve been involved in Domain-Driven Design, since its very earliest days, having the good fortune to be a sounding board for Eric Evans when he wrote his seminal book. It’ll be fun to be around the folks who co...

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, protecting them from the vagaries of corporate life. That's never sounded quite right to me, and a recent con...

I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat  ❄                ❄ We were tired after the event, but our marketing folks forced Rachel Laycock and I to do a quick video. We’re often asked if this event was about creating some kind of new manifesto for...

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, decides which emails to ignore, drafts some emails for the user to approve, and replies to some emails aut...

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 engineering, architectural constraints, and garbage collection of the code base. It's a serious activity: OpenAI too...

I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not had as much time as I’d hoped to share more thoughts from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. I’m still working through my notes and posting fragments - here...

In Februrary 2026, Thoughtworks hosted a workshop called “The Future of Software Development” in Deer Valley Utah. While it was held in the mountains of Utah as a nod to the 25th anniversary of the writing of Manifesto for Agile Software Development, it was a forward-looking event, focusing on how t...

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 Rule, but should the sources recognize themselves and would like to be attributed, then get in touch and ...

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, but other coding assistants are quickly following suit. Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the ...

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 format. These kinds of events are full of ideas, which I do want to share, but I can’t truthfully form them into a coherent narrative ...

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 and spread this practice widely. But most of this is self-defeating, the more a writer uses typographical e...

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 quality by adding a feature using the agent, and seeing what happens to the code. more…

My colleagues here at Thoughtworks have announced AI/works™, a platform for our work using AI-enabled software development. The platform is in its early days, and is currently intended to support Thoughtworks consultants in their client work. I’m looking forward to sharing what we learn from using a...

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 survive change, requiring us to manage our cognitive load. We can do this by mapping the “what” of we want our software t...