Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler
I am Martin Fowler: an author, speaker… essentially a loud-mouthed pundit on the topic of software development, primarily for Enterprise Applications. I work for Thoughtworks, a software delivery company, where I have the exceedingly inappropriate title of “Chief Scientist”. I have written half-a-dozen books on software development, including Refactoring, and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I write for and edit the website martinfowler.com.
August 2026
September 2026
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All posts (33)
Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the orchestrator's context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context. Subagents should be treated as a tool for protecting the...
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...
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...
When people think of legacy modernization, most folks aren't imagining the target environment will be Java 8. But this was the challenge facing Nik Malykhin when he needed to run a Java 1.5 codebase on today's hardware. His early use of LLMs gave plausible answers that did not hold up in the codebase. Progress came...
LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Abstractions and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) provide a strong harness that guides LLMs right from the start. Unmesh Joshi describes how the example of Tickloom - a domain model and DSL for...
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...
Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use. more…
Birgitta Böckeler recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that influence how viable they are for the job. more…
Last week, Thoughtworks ran a second Future of Software Development Retreat, this time in Europe. As with the previous event, I’ll be sharing some fragmentary thoughts on this. There were five parallel streams, so I could, at best, only attend ⅕ of sessions. This isn’t an event that forms conclusions, rather one...
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