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Fragments: August 4
04 Aug 2026, by admin
There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face. This prompted Anthropic to check what their models were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, discovered three incidents where models had gained unauthorized access to data in other organizations. Simon Wilison concluded: It’s abundantly […]
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The Conductor Developer
31 Jul 2026, by admin
TL;DRWhy I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly enough. For the last couple of years we’ve framed AI as a productivity tool. How much faster can it write code? How many more […]
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The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
30 Jul 2026, by admin
As part of getting to grips with the new world of agentic engineering, I built an application to support my work. It’s a sophisticated app: high-quality web UI with dynamic refresh and look-up, modals and auto-save, integrations to external systems, machine learning and text analysis, background jobs, and a proper environment setup with fully automated […]
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Why I’m Writing Rachel’s Ramblings
28 Jul 2026, by admin
TL;DRI have ideas. I haven’t been writing them. That’s about to change. I promise… myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about talent. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking. And writing. Or more specifically, not writing. This really hit me earlier this year at the Future of Software conference. I was surrounded by people […]
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The Orchestrator’s Tax
28 Jul 2026, by admin
I was deep into a Claude Code session on a .NET codebase when a doubt interrupted the work. Four subagents were already running against a response-pipeline refactor, results were arriving out of order, and the session had started to feel harder to reason about than the code itself. That is usually the moment I stop […]
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Fragments: July 21
21 Jul 2026, by admin
With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available. They have five headline findings: Code generation is no longer the bottleneck — verification is. ‘Harness engineering’ is emerging as a […]
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The Archaeologist’s Copilot
16 Jul 2026, by admin
The “Tourist” Trap We all have “that” repository in our organization. The one written in 2005, built with Ant, using Java 1.5. It hasn’t been compiled since the Obama administration, and it certainly doesn’t run on your new Apple Silicon MacBook. When I inherited this “Brownfield” project, the temptation is to treat Generative AI as […]
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DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs
14 Jul 2026, by admin
Modern LLMs possess an incredible capability. They can generate large amounts of code, and sometimes entire systems, from just a high-level natural language description. An important assumption here is that the ‘intent’ of what needs to be built is well articulated, using precise words that LLMs can map to coding building blocks. However, there are […]
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Fragments: July 13
13 Jul 2026, by admin
Some more of my notes from Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. When we had our first retreat in Utah early this year, nobody had heard of Harness Engineering. This time we had a whole session on it. When comes to the guide side of harnesses, most of the discussion is about context management. While […]
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Experiences with local models for coding
08 Jul 2026, by admin
This is the second memo where I describe my recent experiences on running small models locally on my developer machine for agentic coding. In the first memo, I covered the many factors that can influence the viability of that setup — hardware, model choice, runtime, harness. Here I focus on the concrete experiences, the tasks […]
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