Martin Fowler

NEW § Birgitta Böckeler adds exploration of three sensors for static code analysis, with mixed results. Computational sensors alone cannot help us much, AI is needed to add semantic interpretation, and consider trade-offs. #StaticCodeAnalysisDependencyRules" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">martinfowler.com/articles/senso…

NEW POST Birgitta Böckeler begins an article about her experiences with sensors in an agent harness. This first part looks at static analysis with basic code linting. martinfowler.com/articles/senso…

@paulg The best shortcut to getting rich is to be born to rich parents.

At one point my son and his friend kept looking for shortcuts to getting rich. Over and over I told them the way to do it is just to make something people want. If this is what I tell my own kids about getting rich, why won't politicians believe this is how a lot of people do it?

Fragments: thoughts from a software development retreat, would I be a writer without text editors, use LLMs as functions, don't use LLM skills, is the future of everything lies? martinfowler.com/fragments/2026…

NEW POST When I need to feed an LLM a lot of context, I can write it myself, or I can get an LLM to interview me for it. martinfowler.com/bliki/Interrog…

NEW POST Will there be source code in the future? To wrestle with this, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: instructions to a machine and a conceptual model of the problem domain. martinfowler.com/articles/what-…

@NateSilver538 It's certainly not vibecoding according to its original definition where you "forget that the code even exists". I like to follow @simonw's view here: simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vi… The term lost its precision quickly, but I think it's worth trying to restore it.

Q for a forthcoming story. Let's say a knowledgeable programmer writes a complex script with help from AI. He orchestrates the model and carefully monitors its progress, including reviewing code. But he isn't writing in code himself; the AI translates from his natural language.

@shannah78 @WeiZhang595190 I've not had chance to do any more than scan your article. But I did notice you incorrectly attributed it to me. The authors are Wei Zhang (@WeiZhang595190) and Jessie Jie Xia. I am just the publisher.

@martinfowler @WeiZhang595190 I wrote a blog post on some of my SPDD experimentation so far. ghostwriter.sjhannah.com/blog/2026/05/0…

NEW POST Thoughtworks internal IT use a workflow for agentic programming called Structured-Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD). @WeiZhang595190 and Jessie Jie Xia describe how this works with a simple example plus details in a github project. martinfowler.com/articles/struc…

The Democratic Establishment is trying to rig a primary in Massachusetts. And they're using AI money to help. Stand up to this by going to bethfordemocracy.com and donating to help us reboot democracy.

Fragments: open-source framework for prompting patterns, musician sues google for defamation, apple is thinking differently about AI spending, running LLMs locally, will The Genie be caught in the tar pit? martinfowler.com/fragments/2026…

Fragments: updated guide on AI coding, video on harness engineering, how long should a function be, the problems of Software Brain and why AI is unpopular martinfowler.com/fragments/2026…

Fragments: 34th Thoughtworks Technology Radar, what happens when developers don't read the LLM's code, DirectFile and tech in large organizations martinfowler.com/fragments/2026…

@wirthkarl Have you seen some of Birgitta's more recent posts, such as martinfowler.com/articles/harne…

Thank you for this post. It goes into detail on the underlying context (prompts, MCP, skills, history) but doesn't cover the immediate context of the active file or set of files that the agent is considering, recent changes to those files. We have found this to be essential to the quality of the result

NEW POST Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of modern LLM tools. Birgitta Böckeler explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example. martinfowler.com/articles/explo…

Fragments: pragmatic summit video with Kent and Gergely, virtue of laziness, TDD and prompts, inspiration from Dark Star martinfowler.com/fragments/2026…

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. Worth seeing if you’re near Boston this month. centralsquaretheater.org/shows/breaking…

Fragments: two podcasts, a worryingly well-done supply-chain attack, framework for tech documentation, and a particularly thoughtful AI coding experience martinfowler.com/fragments/2026…

@_rygo6 @MikeyH5493 Caer made no attempt to claim mechanical sympathy as their idea nor their name. They state at the beginning of the article where the inspiration came from, which is a different source to DOD, with a similar vintage.

Imagine if someone wrote a post describing aspects of Object Oriented Programming then called it something different like “Behavioral Sympathy” then acted as though it was their idea. You would not take that person seriously. Albeit Data Oriented Design is not as pervasively known as Object Oriented, it is still a well known subject amongst those who work in performance oriented problem domains.

NEW POST Modern hardware is fast, but software often fails to leverage it. Caer Sanders guides his work with mechanical sympathy. He distills this into principles: predictable memory access, awareness of cache lines, single-writer, natural batching martinfowler.com/articles/mecha…

@MikeyH5493 What makes you think that mechanical sympathy is DOD renamed and rebranded? Often different people come up with similar ideas.

youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc?si… It seems, to ensure it fits enterprise environments, to have been renamed and branded. To have Mechanical Sympathy is to use the principles and strategies employed within DOD(which is just the way old school game devs and critical systems folks program). Highly recommend watching this talk! 🙂

@MikeyH5493 Mechanical Sympathy is a different (but similar) notion and I've not had any indication it was influenced at all by Data Oriented Design.

@martinfowler Any uhmm..chance of mentioning Mike Acton for making this public years ago and the Handmade Network for continuing to bolster it as Data Oriented Design? 🤔 I mean, I'm all for it..but let's give credit where it's due *everywhere*.