Martin Fowler 2d ago

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 wha...

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Martin Fowler 2d ago

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...

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Martin Fowler 4d ago

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...

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Martin Fowler Mar 26

Fragments: March 26

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 t...

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Martin Fowler Mar 24

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 b...

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Martin Fowler Mar 19

Fragments: March 19

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 cod...

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Martin Fowler Mar 17

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...

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Martin Fowler Mar 16

Fragments: March 16

Annie Vella did some research into how 158 professional software engineers used AI, her first question was: Are AI tools shifting where engineers actually sp...

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Martin Fowler Mar 10

Fragments: March 10

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 c...

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Martin Fowler Mar 5

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...

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Martin Fowler Mar 4

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 goa...

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Martin Fowler Mar 3

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 w...

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