Martin Fowler
Press release/News aggregator
I started martinfowler.com as a place to keep my own writings, initially just articles I'd written for other purposes. In the early 2000s, blogs got popular and that encouraged me to start the bliki in 2003 to engage with some more informal writing.
As the site got more popular, I felt I could use it to help other people get more visibility for their writing, so I've steadily increased publications from others here. I vet each article before accepting it - and often do a considerable amount of developmental editing too - so there isn't a high rate of publication. I do believe, however, that the quality of the articles matters much more than the quantity.
The topics of the articles I publish cover a broad range of software development, from writers who share my broad philosophy favoring agile approaches that appreciate the importance of technical skill in making that style work effectively. Many are, or have been, colleagues of mine at Thoughtworks, although that isn't mandatory. I generally only consider articles from people I know, although occasionally from those I don't but are vouched for by those I do. Source
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| Scope | National |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | United States of America |
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesMaking Your Data Ready for Agentic AI
There's a lot of excitement right now about agent frameworks, orchestration patterns, and protocols. All of it matters, but almost none of it delivers value if you skip the data layer. Before any agent framework can produce useful outcomes, your data has to be in a shape that a machine can consume, trust, and act on. In this article, we discuss what your data needs to look like for agentic AI to derive value from it. We've spent quite a bit of time building data architectures for the human consumer.
Fragments: August 24
I was listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Helen Toner about the recent OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and the subsequent discovery that there were swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned activities. One of the points Klein made was that at no point did any of these (thousands of?) agents ever try to check in with a human [Klein:] So these message boards — you have however many A.I. agents posting hundreds of thousands of messages.
Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern
TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually starts the same way. A non-techie, maybe an executive, tells me about something they’ve built over the weekend. Sometimes it’s a chatbot. Sometimes it’s an internal workflow.
Practitioner Voice
The Writing Category Nobody has Named Yet I've been called a Thought Leader. I don't love the term. But I've used it, because there wasn't another one. When PMI-Agile Alliance introduces me, when conference bios get written, when someone asks what kind of writing I do. Thought leadership is the label that fits the slot. It's not wrong. It's just not quite right.
Fragments: August 18
Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard work of building such an organization. So I rely on working with people who are prepared to actually put the effort in. A key partner in all of this is Rachel Laycock, who is the global CTO of Thoughtworks.
TDD inside the agent loop - theater or actual value?
My conclusions I think at this point there is generally more and more evidence that being overly specific about how we want a model to do something is not a sustainable approach. Instead, we should find as many ways as we can to monitor the outcomes and give feedback. That feedback should be automated wherever possible, and we need to carefully think about where we insert ourselves as arbiters of what is good and correct.
Fragments: August 4
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 clear now that running evals of cyberattack potential in models is a spectacularly risky business. Every AI lab needs to pay attention to this.
The Conductor Developer
TL;DR Why 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 features can we ship? How much cheaper can we build software? I think that’s the wrong question, but I understand why.
The Economic Benefit of Refactoring
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 deployment. It’s approximately 150,000 lines of code, primarily in Rust (~120 kLoC) with the remainder in TypeScript and Terraform.
The Orchestrator's Tax
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 trusting the vague sense that things are “probably fine.” Sometimes the code is the problem. Sometimes the architecture is. Occasionally the workflow itself deserves inspection.