Martin Fowler: 13 Feb 2026
I’ve been busy traveling this week, visiting some clients in the Bay Area and attending The Pragmatic Summit. So I’ve not had as much time as I’d hoped to share more thoughts from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat. I’m still working through my notes and posting fragments - here are some more:
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What role do senior developers play as LLMs become established? As befits a gathering of many senior developers, we felt we still have a bright future, focusing more on architectural issues than the messy details of syntax and coding. In some cases, folks who haven’t done much programming in the last decade have found LLMs allow them to get back to that, and managing LLM agents has a lot of similarities to managing junior developers.
One attendee reported that although their senior developers were very resistant to using LLMs, when those senior developers were involved in an exercise that forced them to do some hands-on work with LLMs, a third of them were instantly converted to being very pro-LLM. That suggests that practical experience is important to give senior folks credible information to judge the value, particularly since there’s been striking improvements to models in just the last couple of months. As was quipped, some negative opinions of LLM capabilities “are so January”.
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There’s been much angst posted in recent months about the fate for junior developers, as people are worried that they will be replaced by untiring agents. This group was more sanguine about this, feeling that junior developers will still be needed, if nothing else because they are open-minded about LLMs and familiar with using them. It’s the mid-level developers who face the greatest challenges. They formed their career without LLMs, but haven’t gained the level of experience yet to fully drive them effectively in the way that senior developers do.
LLMs could be helpful to junior developers by providing a always-available mentor, capable of teaching them better programming. Juniors should, of course, have a certain skepticism of their AI mentors, but they should be skeptical of fleshy mentors too. Not all of us are as brilliant as I like to think that I am.
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Attendee Margaret-Anne Storey has published a longer post on the problem of cognitive debt.
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