With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available. They ha

When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing Nik Malykhin when he needed to run a Java 1.

Unmesh Joshi illustrates how LLMs work very effectively with Domain-Specific Languages (DSL). The constrained nature of DSLs make it easier for the LLM to build code based on natural langu

Some more of my notes from Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. When we had our first retreat in Utah early this year, nobody had heard of Harness Engineering. This time we had a whole

Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local models for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day us

Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that influence how viable they are for the job. m

Last week, Thoughtworks ran a second Future of Software Development Retreat, this time in Europe. As with the previous event, I’ll be sharing some fragmentary thoughts on this. There were five paralle

One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studi

“Prag Dave” Thomas (co-author of the outstanding “Pragmatic Programmer”) has loved programming since he was young. Programming was how I could express myself. I wasn’t an artist. When I sing, dogs how

Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out

At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience - a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We

Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. more…

Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security problems. Gautam Koul, Lucian Moss, Neil Drew-L

Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes - but without looking at any of the code that the LLM generates.

Birgitta Böckeler adds discussion of three more sensors for static code analysis, focusing on checking and enforcing better modularity. Computational sensors for dependency checks were goo

In her recent article about harness engineering for coding agent users, Birgitta Böckeler laid out a mental model for expanding a coding agent harness: a system of guides and sensors that

Last week I spent a day at a retreat that brought together several people working in software development to talk about the profession’s future with the rise of agentic programming. The event was help

When we need an LLM to perform a complex task, we often need to feed it a lot of context. Coming up with a design for a new feature requires descriptions of how we want the feature to appear to th

Increasingly humans delegate writing code to agents. Will there even be source code in the future? To wrestle with this question, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code

Over the last couple of months Rahul Garg published a series of posts here on how to reduce the friction in AI-assisted programming. To make it easier to put these ideas into practice he’s now built a