Greg Wilson has noticed that lots of folks are using dodgy metrics to figure out if AI tools are worth their costs. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way;
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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? 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