Good luck to you and your fellow Hungarians. Orbán has been a stain on Europe for years. Let's hope you finally get rid of him.

Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code. It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to both my profession and the fate of free democracies. Worth seeing if you’re in the Boston area this month.

www.centralsquaretheater.org/shows/breaki...

Why are the “age verification” laws bad?

Have you ever tried to use a website and been stumped by a captcha?

Maybe it asked you to pick every square with a bicycle, but you aren’t sure if that tiny bit of tire counts.

Then you have to read numbers: is that a 7 or a 1?

At some point, you give up.

Fragments: two podcasts, a worryingly well-done supply-chain attack, framework for tech documentation, and a particularly thoughtful AI coding experience

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

For me, the *only* objective in writing is #1. I consider #2 and #3 as welcome side-effects. And I say this knowing that #3 is what pays the bills.

Feedback Flywheel

NEW POST

Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted Development with a structured practice that feeds back learnings from AI sessions into the team's shared artifacts, turning individual experience into collective improvement.

martinfowler.com/articles/red...

original post deleted due to errors in attribution. Replacement at: bsky.app/profile/mart...

Principles of Mechanical Sympathy Principles of mechanical sympathy for creating performant software: Memory access patterns, false sharing, the single-writer principle, and natural batching.

NEW POST

Modern hardware is fast, but software often fails to leverage it. @withcaer.com guides their work with mechanical sympathy. They distill this into principles: predictable memory access, awareness of cache lines, single-writer, natural batching

martinfowler.com/articles/mec...

Fragments: April 2 fragments 02 Apr 2026

Fragments: three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expensive if agents make coding free, and the future of source code

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Harness engineering for coding agent users A mental model for building trust in coding agents through feedforward guides, feedback sensors, and iterative harness engineering.

NEW POST

@birgitta410.bsky.social wrote some initial thoughts about Harness Engineering last month. Since then she's been researching more and has now written a thoughtful mental model for understanding the topic.

martinfowler.com/articles/har...

Encoding Team Standards

NEW POST

The quality of what AI coding assistants produce depends on how well the prompter articulates team standards. Rahul Garg proposes treating such instructions as infrastructure: versioned, reviewed, and shared artifacts.

martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Fragments: March 26 fragments 26 Mar 2026

Fragments: 80,000 people's opinion on AI, fixing the common gap in spec-driven development, weakening defenses against covert attacks on the U.S.

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

bliki: Architecture Decision Record A short document that captures a single decision, structured into a log to provide a history

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ADRs are short documents that capture a decision, structured into logs that reveal a history of architectural thinking for a product

martinfowler.com/bliki/Archit...

Fragments: March 19 fragments 19 Mar 2026

Fragments: code review isn't just catching bugs, what role for observability in agentic programming, what we lose with GPS over maps

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Context Anchoring Externalize decision context into a living document shared between model sessions

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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 Anchoring externalizes the decision context into a living document.

martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Fragments: March 16 fragments 16 Mar 2026

Fragments: supervisory engineering, 2 sets of 8 levels, generating code to an architecture, perils of detecting AI-aided writing, should humans review code?

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: March 10 fragments 10 Mar 2026

Fragments: reporting fines, engaging with gen AI, experience engineering, watching the ralph loop, migrating COBOL

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Ideological Resistance to Patents, Followed by Reluctant Pragmatism A personal account of moving from ideological opposition to patents toward a defensive, pragmatic approach for protecting innovation.

NEW POST

Naresh Jain has long been uncomfortable with software patents. But a direct experience of patent aggression, together with practical constraints startups face, led him to resort to defensive patenting as as a shield in this asymmetric legal environment.

martinfowler.com/articles/pat...

Humans and Agents in Software Engineering Loops Notes from my Thoughtworks colleagues on AI-assisted software delivery

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There's been much talk about how AI agents affect the workflow loops of software development. @kief.com focuses on the goal of turning ideas into outcomes by building and managing the working loop, rather than leaving the agents to it or micromanaging.

martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

my immediate reaction is "how do you measure design quality?"

But the feedback I'm hearing is that iff you are careful with your prompting, you can get decent code out of them these days.

Design-First Collaboration Before writing code, dialog with progressive levels of design alignment

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Rahul Garg uses a structured conversation with an AI agent that mirrors whiteboarding with a human pair: progressive levels of design alignment before any code, reducing cognitive load, and catching misunderstandings at the cheapest possible moment.

martinfowler.com/articles/red...

And if you enjoy podcasts, do have a listen to the 99% invisible series on The Power Broker. It's a great accompaniment to the book

Yes, got through the LBJ ones. I enjoyed how #3 reveled in his senate maneuvers, particularly the passing of the, admittedly hollow, civil rights act. The fourth has great portraits of the Kennedys and his description of the day of assassination is totally gripping.

I His books are huge, but I can

My reading this year was dominated by Robert Caro. The books are huge, but so worth it. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Fragments: February 25 fragments 25 Feb 2026

Fragments: how organizations are using AI, reflections from the Utah retreat, agentic engineering patterns, inserting friction for security, training biological neural networks

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Knowledge Priming Priming an LLM with project context before each session

NEW POST

Rahul Garg sees a frustration loop when working with AI and identified five patterns to help. Here's the first: priming the LLM with knowledge about the codebase and preferred coding patterns.

martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Fragments: February 23 fragments 23 Feb 2026

Fragments: security with OpenClaw, impressions from Pragmatic Summit, era of highly bespoke software, life-size pocket map

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Fragments: February 19 fragments 19 Feb 2026

Fragments: LLMs make our days harder, an LLM reacts badly to a rejected pull request, the Promptware Kill Chain, horror and elation trying Claude Code for two weeks, Free Speech Poseurs' silence to real threats

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

bliki: Host Leadership A leader acts as a host, creating space for participants to act.

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The concept of Servant Leadership has never quite sat properly with me, because it's essentially gaslighting. Recently I came across Host Leadership as a better framing.

martinfowler.com/bliki/HostLe...

Fragments: February 18 fragments 18 Feb 2026

Fragments: Detailed report on the Thoughtworks AI retreat, should we write a manifesto for AI-enabled development, is spec-driven development the return of waterfall, LLMs perform better in healthy codebases

martinfowler.com/fragments/20...