At the GOTO Conference in Copenhagen in 2025, Kent Beck and I spent some time on stage talking and answering questions from the audience – a format I refer to as “two old geezers on a park bench”. We talk about our experiences with LLM-augmented programming (at that point – October 2025), we show our […]
Maintainability sensors for coding agents
There are multiple dimensions we usually want to achieve and monitor in our codebases: Functional correctness (works as intended), architectural fitness (is fast/secure/usable enough), and maintainability. I define maintainability here as making it easy and low risk to change the codebase over time – also known as “internal quality”. So I don’t only want to […]
The VibeSec Reckoning
Vibe coding has significantly accelerated software prototyping but AI agents frequently recommend insecure configurations, creating security problems. Gautam Koul, Lucian Moss, Neil Drew-Lopez, and Daberechi Ruth Edeokoh share their experience while building applications for Thoughtworks’s global marketing. They learned that to combat this we need to write a security context file to guide the AI, […]
Vibe Coding
Vibe coding is building a software application by prompting an LLM, telling it what to build, trying it out, prompting for changes – but without looking at any of the code that the LLM generates. This technique can be used by people without any knowledge of programming. However the resulting software often shows problems with […]
Maintainability sensors for coding agents
There are multiple dimensions we usually want to achieve and monitor in our codebases: Functional correctness (works as intended), architectural fitness (is fast/secure/usable enough), and maintainability. I define maintainability here as making it easy and low risk to change the codebase over time – also known as “internal quality”. So I don’t only want to […]
Maintainability sensors for coding agents
There are multiple dimensions we usually want to achieve and monitor in our codebases: Functional correctness (works as intended), architectural fitness (is fast/secure/usable enough), and maintainability. I define maintainability here as making it easy and low risk to change the codebase over time – also known as “internal quality”. So I don’t only want to […]
Fragments: May 14
Last week I spent a day at a retreat that brought together several people working in software development to talk about the profession’s future with the rise of agentic programming. The event was help under the Chatham House Rule, so I can’t attribute the comments and stories I heard. (If anyone recognizes themselves, and would […]
Interrogatory LLM
When we need an LLM to perform a complex task, we often need to feed it a lot of context. Coming up with a design for a new feature requires descriptions of how we want the feature to appear to the user, guidelines on how it should be implemented, information on external systems to consult, […]
What Is Code?
What is code? At a high level, the answer to this question seems obvious. Code is what developers write: instructions expressed in a programming language that tells machines what to do. For years, writing code meant typing it out, word by word. Progress is measured by how efficiently code can be produced, compiled, tested and […]
Mythical Man Month
In the early 1960s, Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM’s System/360 computer systems. After it was done he penned his thoughts in the book The Mythical Man-Month which became one of the most influential books on software development after its publication in 1975. Reading it in 2026, we’ll find some of it outdated, but […]
