Martin Fowler: 18 Feb 2026
I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat
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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
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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 replacements are forming, but they are not yet mature. The ideas ready for broader industry conversation include the supervisory engineering middle loop, risk tiering as the new core engineering discipline, TDD as the strongest form of prompt engineering and the agent experience reframe for developer experience investment.
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Annie Vella posted her take-aways from the event
I walked into that room expecting to learn from people who were further ahead. People who’d cracked the code on how to adopt AI at scale, how to restructure teams around it, how to make it work. Some of the sharpest minds in the software industry were sitting around those tables. And nobody has it all figured out. There is more uncertainty than certainty. About how to use AI well, what it’s really doing to productivity, how roles are shifting, what the impact will be, how things will evolve. Everyone is working it out as they go. I actually found that to be quite comforting, in many ways. Yes, we walked away with more questions than answers, but at least we now have a shared understanding of the sorts of questions we should be asking. That might be the most valuable outcome of all.
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