My colleagues here at Thoughtworks have announced AI/works™, a platform for our work using AI-enabled software development. The platform is in its early days, and is currently intended to support Thoughtworks consultants in their client work. I’m looking forward to sharing what we learn from using and further developing the platform in future months. ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ […]
LLMs and the what/how loop
All this matters even when we use LLMs and prompt them. I recently experimented with writing a miniature object store inspired by the MinIO codebase. When I asked the LLM to derive the implementation for MinIO, it produced something that was too procedural and harder to understand. When I wrote it myself, step by step, […]
Stop Picking Sides
I like Agile. I like discipline. I like systems that ship and systems that learn. What I don’t like: tribes. In the last couple decades, many teams camped at the ends of a spectrum: Traditional shops treated optimization as virtue and adaptation as risk. Agile shops treated adaptation as virtue and optimization as betrayal. Both […]
My favorite musical discoveries of 2025
I listen to a lot of music, it’s a constant accompaniment to my work and our evening relaxing. I don’t use streaming services, every couple of weeks I buy a bunch of digital albums and listen to them every day until we’re ready for a new batch. Here’s my favorite six from last year’s listening. […]
Fragments: January 8
Anthropic report on how their AI is changing their own software development practice. Most usage is for debugging and helping understand existing code Notable increase in using it for implementing new features Developers using it for 59% of their work and getting 50% productivity increase 14% of developers are “power users” reporting much greater gains […]
Fragments: December 16
Gitanjali Venkatraman does wonderful illustrations of complex subjects (which is why I was so happy to work with her on our Expert Generalists article). She has now published the latest in her series of illustrated guides: tackling the complex topic of Mainframe Modernization In it she illustrates the history and value of mainframes, why modernization […]
Writing Fragments
If you’re a regular reader of my site, you’ll have noticed that in the last few months I’ve been making a number of “fragments” posts. Such a post is a short post with a bunch of little, unconnected segments. These are usually a reference to something I’ve found on the web, sometimes a small thought […]
Fragments Dec 11
Why does AI write like… that (NYT, gift link). Sam Kriss delves into the quiet hum of AI writing. AI’s work is not compelling prose: it’s phantom text, ghostly scribblings, a spectre woven into our communal tapestry. ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ Emily Bache has written a set of Test Desiderata, building on some earlier writing from Kent Beck. […]
Expert Generalists
Writing a sophisticated computer program often requires a lot of detailed knowledge. If we do this in Java, we need to know the syntax of the language, the wide range of libraries available to assist us in the work, the various tools required to verify and build our programs. If we do this in Python […]
Generative AI in software and essaying
Korny Sietsma has a great example of how using an LLM for coding is very helpful but with limitations… and a thoughtful general essay on why the hype and the immovable skeptics are both missing the train. While here, a professor of poetry ponders (gift link) on the value and limits of AI with writing: […]
