Fragments: February 18

I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat ❄ ❄ We were tired after the event, but our marketing folks forced Rachel Laycock and I to do a quick video. We’re often asked if this event was about creating some kind of new manifesto for AI-enabled development, akin to the Agile Manifesto (which is now 25 years old). In short, our answer is “no”, but for the full answer, watch our video ❄ ❄ My colleagues put together a detailed summary of thoughts from the event, in a 17 page PDF. It breaks the discussion down into eight major themes, including “Where does the rigor go?”, “The middle loop: a new category of work”, “Technical foundations: languages, semantics and operating systems”, and “The human side: roles, skills and experience”. The retreat surfaced a consistent pattern: the practices, tools and organizational structures built for human-only software development are breaking in predictable ways under the weight of AI-assisted work. The