Martin Fowler
@martinfowler.com
16K followers 71 following 150 posts
Software Design Loudmouth. Works for Thoughtworks. Also hikes, watches theater, and plays modern board games. He/him. host of https://martinfowler.com
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martinfowler.com
I'd avoid "vibe" - as it's closely associated with vibe coding. I rather like @kentbeck.com' s use of "augmented" programming. Although the need for such a term won't last long as it becomes BAU.
martinfowler.com
Can we use AI to help services update with their templates?
birgitta410.bsky.social
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...
Overview diagram showing a coding agent connected to a reference application via an MCP server. The agent can find latest changes, get the latest commit from the reference application.
Reposted by Martin Fowler
kentbeck.com
Beth certainly will!
beth4ma.bsky.social
When I am elected, I will read the code DOGE wrote. I will find out how they stole your data and what they have done with it.

And then I will tell you
martinfowler.com
Is this saying that Trump thinks he's "T Rex" but really he's "T Reckless"?
martinfowler.com
Online articles can also have a long shelf life. There are articles on my site that were published in the 00s that still get solid traffic. Indeed 25% of my traffic is to articles > 10 years old.

martinfowler.com/articles/202...
2024 Analysis of Traffic to martinfowler.com
A long-form article entitled: "2024 Analysis of Traffic to martinfowler.com"
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

I'm about to head off on travels for the next few weeks. Before I go, here's a bunch of scattered thoughts about Gen-AI and software development

martinfowler.com/articles/202...
Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development
a short post
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

Legacy Modernization is hard, especially when we've lost the source code. Thiyagu Palanisamy and Chandirasekar Thiagarajan describe how AI helped them reverse engineer.

martinfowler.com/articles/bla...
From Black Box to Blueprint
Lost source code? Legacy systems don’t have to stay black boxes—AI can turn them into blueprints
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
One of the advantages of old age is that you’re older. 👨‍🦳
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

The Bahmni open-source hospital management system was built with an AngularJS front-end over OpenMRS REST API. Rahul Ramesh is using AI tools to convert it to React over FHIR.

martinfowler.com/articles/res...
Research, Review, Rebuild
Using an LLM to change an existing system
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

CLI coding agents are powerful tools but don't understand your particular environment. Ben O'Mahony shows how to assemble your own.

martinfowler.com/articles/bui...
Building your own CLI Coding Agent with Pydantic-AI
How to build a CLI coding agent
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
Not a thing to rush to volunteer for, considering what happened to her.
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

Unmesh Joshi and I had an interesting email conversation about how when programming with an LLM he likes to grow a language of abstractions.

martinfowler.com/articles/con...
Conversation: LLMs and Building Abstractions
How should we work with LLMs when growing abstractions?
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
@bethcodes.bsky.social was over last night for a game of Steam Power, but was denied victory by Cindy
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

When I used to give talks, I was very good at keeping them to the allotted time, even with a last-minute change. Key tool: Expansion Joints.

martinfowler.com/bliki/Expans...
bliki: Expansion Joints
a bliki entry for Expansion Joints
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
A big electoral reform movement in 19C Britain was the Chartists. One of their demands was for MPs to be paid, so that ordinary people could take on the job.

While not paying legislators sounds appealing, it leads to lots of bad outcomes.
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

OKRs are popular but often set in a top-down cascade. Paulo Caroli describes a path for teams to create their own, in a collaborative process to align with broader strategy.

martinfowler.com/articles/tea...
Team OKRs in Action
Rather than cascade OKRs, use collaborative alignment.
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
FINAL §

@srny.bsky.social concludes his article in impact intelligence by addressing five common objections to this activity, including slowing down, lack of agility and collaboration, and the unpredictability of innovation.

martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence
A guide for technology leaders and their teams to shift the organization
martinfowler.com
Reposted by Martin Fowler
gergely.pragmaticengineer.com
This is why the whole thing is so hard to trust and if you have any critical thinking, you stay away from such rankings. The same is true for Gartner, where many vendors also pay very heavy sums to Gartner to have Gartner evaulate them
Reposted by Martin Fowler
skamille.themanagerswrath.com
So to be impressed by a machine going way beyond the question asked feels like the technical implementation of this exact anti-pattern. Worse, all that generated output creates significant gravity/path dependence, your brain turns off all that much faster. Why do we assume this is good?
martinfowler.com
Five Quick Reads: Durable v Disposable code, Domain Models as memory, getting AI to generate its own coding rules, what AI should stand for, and what loses more time than you save with AI

martinfowler.com/articles/202...
Quick but worthwhile links
a short post
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
NEW §

@srny.bsky.social continues his article on impact intelligence by outlining five actions that can be done to improve impact intelligence including: demand management, impact validation, and an alternative to ROI.

martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence
A guide for technology leaders and their teams to shift the organization
martinfowler.com
martinfowler.com
Nik Malykhin found it useful to get an AI assistant to write its own coding rules by analyzing his code, and then asking it to refine them as worked with it.

nik1379616.substack.com/p/can-we-mak...
Can We Make AI Code Assistants Smarter by Asking Them to Write Their Own Rules?
It seems logical, doesn't it?
nik1379616.substack.com
martinfowler.com
NEW POST

Sriram Narayan looks at how to properly assess the effectiveness of software development - by developing an intelligence about its business impact

martinfowler.com/articles/imp...
The Reformist CTO’s Guide to Impact Intelligence
A guide for technology leaders and their teams to shift the organization
martinfowler.com