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 think

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

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 ins

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

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 co

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.

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 Anc

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

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 prev

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

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 outcome

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:

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 u

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

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. Whi

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 soun

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, prote

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

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, de

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 engi