It was very interesting to read OpenAI’s recent write-up on “Harness engineering” which describes how a team used “no manually typed code at all” as a forcing function to build a harness for maintaining a large application with AI agents. After 5 months, they’ve built a real product that’s now over 1 million lines of […]
Fragments: February 13
I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not has as much time as I’d hoped to share more thoughts from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. I’m still working through my notes and posting fragments – here are some more: ❄ ❄ […]
Fragments: February 9
Some more thoughts from last week’s open space gathering on the future of software development in the age of AI. I haven’t attributed any comments since we were operating under the Chatham House Rule, but should the sources recognize themselves and would like to be attributed, then get in touch and I’ll edit this post. […]
Context Engineering for Coding Agents
The number of options we have to configure and enrich a coding agent’s context has exploded over the past few months. Claude Code is leading the charge with innovations in this space, but other coding assistants are quickly following suit. Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of these tools. […]
Fragments: February 4
I’ve spent a couple of days at a Thoughtworks-organized event in Deer Valley Utah. It was my favorite kind of event, a really great set of attendees in an Open Space format. These kinds of events are full of ideas, which I do want to share, but I can’t truthfully form them into a coherent […]
Excessive Bold
I’m increasingly seeing a lot of technical and business writing make heavy use of bold font weights, in an attempt to emphasize what the writers think is important. LLMs seem to have picked up and spread this practice widely. But most of this is self-defeating, the more a writer uses typographical emphasis, the less power […]
Assessing internal quality while coding with an agent
There’s no shortage of reports on how AI coding assistants, agents, and fleets of agents have written vast amounts of code in a short time, code that reportedly implements the features desired. It’s rare that people talk about non-functional requirements like performance or security in that context, maybe because that’s not a concern in many […]
Fragments: January 22
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 […]
