📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

One of the challenges with service templates is that once a team instantiated a service with a template, it’s tedious to feed template updates back to those services. I wonder if anchoring AI agents to a template or reference application could help make that easier? martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

To vibe or not to vibe? I wrote a new memo about the constant little risk assessments I make during AI-assisted coding, thinking about probability and impact if AI gets it wrong, and if I will be able to detect that. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Wild to me that a CEO sets goals about outcomes that have nothing to do with the business (are customers more satisfied? Is the product more reliable? Etc.)

Setting the goal of what % of code should be AI-generated is as useful as setting the goal of how many lines of code devs should write per day

We recently ran an experiment to explore how far GenAI can currently be pushed toward autonomously developing high-quality, up-to-date software without human intervention, and gather observations about where it breaks down.

martinfowler.com/articles/pus...

Gemeinsam mit Publix und @algorithmwatch.org laden wir ein zum Gespräch mit @meredithmeredith.bsky.social, Präsidentin des Messengers Signal, über die Frage, wie wir Technologie wieder stärker an menschlichen Bedürfnissen ausrichten können – vor allem beim Schutz unserer Privatsphäre.
➡️ t.ly/lIzA3

I totally get it, I’m also tired of much of the public discourse. But here is one more argument for experienced devs like the author: If we want to guide & teach the „juniors“, we have a responsibility to know first hand what works and what doesn’t, because they are using LLMs if we like it or not.

I've seen a surge of discussions recently about large AI-generated change sets that are impossible to review by humans, paired with speculation if we still need to care about the code in the future. I expect to continue to care, especially if I'm on call for it martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

I wrote a guest post on The Pragmatic Engineer newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/two-years-... rounding up 2 years of using AI coding assistants - how they evolved; ways of working; impact I see on speed, quality and team flow; and some thoughts on the future

Tukey

xkcd.com/3104/

I blurghed some thoughts blog.thepete.net/blog/2025/06...

Starting to realize what makes me nervous about Devin et al. It becomes a new incantation of the perennial problem of letting a stakeholder get work done by shoulder-tapping their favorite young engineer

And I just thought about agents causing that, now @thepete.net is bringing up the possibility of non-coding managers doing it too, with AI‘s help…

In the past few weeks, a new surge of "background" coding agents came out. I wrote down an example of using OpenAI's Codex, this will hopefully help you understand better what they do under the hood, and which agent category they fall into.

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

When I code with an AI agent, I revert to the last comfortable checkpoint as soon as I feel like losing control. I wonder what that will be like for the delivery managers & POs of the future, what will THEY do when things around them change so fast and erratically that they feel like losing control?

Good scope management is the linchpin of agile software delivery. Generative AI is like a scope chaos monkey, generating more code, more story details, more requirements than necessary

NEW POST

To work effectively with agentic coding assistants, Birgitta Böckeler found she needs to intervene, correct and steer all the time. She describes examples of these interventions indicating the skills we need to correct the tools' missteps

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Nice write-up by @harper.lol on his AI-assisted coding workflow. I personally prefer in-IDE tools, but the concepts are reusable. ❤️ this:"I really want someone to solve this problem in a way that makes coding with an LLM a multiplayer game. Not a solo hacker experience."

harper.blog/2025/02/16/m...

I have thoughts and open questions about the role reasoning models might play or not play in coding assistance. A lot of stake is put into how reasoning models are a step change in coding assistance, but I don't see it - yet?

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Cursor's "Composer" does it, Codeium released a new editor called "Windsurf", and GitHub Copilot's new "Copilot Edit" feature makes this capability available to many of our clients at Thoughtworks, where Copilot currently remains the most widely adopted tool.

Multi-file editing capabilities have been available in open-source tools like Cline and Aider for some time, but in just the past few weeks some of the major commercial coding assistance products have released that capability.

New GenAI memo: I wrote down my thoughts and observations about the multi-file editing features that are currently being released in lots of coding assistants: martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

New "GenAI memo": In this one I explore the potential of AI assistance for tech stack migrations. I describe building an agent that changes the testing framework used in a test. As a side effect you can also gain a better understanding of how AI agents work: martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

My talk at GOTO Amsterdam is now live on YouTube: "AI Assistance Beyond Code: What Do We Need to Make it Work?" youtu.be/8jwiABwGC6c?...

In my newest "GenAI memo", I explore how today's AI tools can assist with onboarding to existing, potentially messy codebases. I do this by trying to understand and solve an issue in a real life codebase: martinfowler.com/articles/exp...