Chris Parsons has updated his guide on using AI to code. This is his third update, what I like about it is that he gives a lot of concrete information about how he uses AI, with sufficient detail that we can learn from him. His advice also resonates with the better advice I’ve seen out […]
Structured-Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD)
Once a team adopts AI coding assistants, the first gains show up at the individual level: one developer can draft, modify, and refactor code much faster than before. But delivery speed is rarely limited by typing. When you look at the full delivery lifecycle, from requirements through release, new friction appears: Ambiguous requirements become code […]
Fragments: April 21
Last week Thoughtworks released the 34th volume of our Technology Radar. This radar is our biannual survey of our experience of the technology scene, highlighting tools, techniques, platforms, and languages that we’ve used or otherwise caught our eye. This edition contains 118 blips, each briefly describing our impressions of one of these elements. As we […]
Fragments: April 14
I attended the first Pragmatic Summit early this year, and while there host Gergely Orosz interviewed Kent Beck and myself on stage. The video runs for about half-an-hour. I always enjoy nattering with Kent like this, and Gergely pushed into some worthwhile topics. Given the timing, AI dominated the conversation – we compared it to […]
Alan Turing play in Cambridge MA
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. Well worth seeing if you’re in the Boston area this month. Source link
Fragments: April 9
I mostly link to written material here, but I’ve recently listened to two excellent podcasts that I can recommend. Anyone who regularly reads these fragments knows that I’m a big fan of Simon Willison, his (also very fragmentary) posts have earned a regular spot in my RSS reader. But the problem with fragments, however valuable, […]
Feedback Flywheel
Teams have always had mechanisms for collective learning. Retrospectives, post-incident reviews, lunch-and-learns. The best of these share a property: they convert individual experience into shared practice. What one person encountered in a debugging session or a production incident becomes something the whole team knows. The knowledge escapes the individual and enters the team’s infrastructure: its […]
Principles of Mechanical Sympathy
Over the past decade, hardware has seen tremendous advances, from unified memory that’s redefined how consumer GPUs work, to neural engines that can run billion-parameter AI models on a laptop. And yet, software is still slow, from seconds-long cold starts for simple serverless functions, to hours-long ETL pipelines that merely transform CSV files into rows […]
Fragments: April 2
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 thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health: Technical debt lives in […]
Harness engineering for coding agent users
The term harness has emerged as a shorthand to mean everything in an AI agent except the model itself – Agent = Model + Harness. That is a very wide definition, and therefore worth narrowing down for common categories of agents. I want to take the liberty here of defining its meaning in the bounded […]
