An Architecture Decision Record (ADR) is a short document that captures and explains a single decision relevant to a product or ecosystem. Documents should be short, just a couple of pages, and contain the decision, the context for making it, and significant ramifications. They should not be modified if the decision is changed, but linked
Why does AI write like… that (NYT, gift link). Sam Kriss delves into the quiet hum of AI writing. AI’s work is not compelling prose: it’s phantom text, ghostly scribblings, a spectre woven into our communal tapestry. ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ Emily Bache has written a set of Test Desiderata, building on some earlier writing from Kent Beck.
If you’re a regular reader of my site, you’ll have noticed that in the last few months I’ve been making a number of “fragments” posts. Such a post is a short post with a bunch of little, unconnected segments. These are usually a reference to something I’ve found on the web, sometimes a small thought
I listen to a lot of music, it’s a constant accompaniment to my work and our evening relaxing. I don’t use streaming services, every couple of weeks I buy a bunch of digital albums and listen to them every day until we’re ready for a new batch. Here’s my favorite six from last year’s listening.
I like Agile. I like discipline. I like systems that ship and systems that learn. What I don’t like: tribes. In the last couple decades, many teams camped at the ends of a spectrum: Traditional shops treated optimization as virtue and adaptation as risk. Agile shops treated adaptation as virtue and optimization as betrayal. Both
All this matters even when we use LLMs and prompt them. I recently experimented with writing a miniature object store inspired by the MinIO codebase. When I asked the LLM to derive the implementation for MinIO, it produced something that was too procedural and harder to understand. When I wrote it myself, step by step,
There’s no shortage of reports on how AI coding assistants, agents, and fleets of agents have written vast amounts of code in a short time, code that reportedly implements the features desired. It’s rare that people talk about non-functional requirements like performance or security in that context, maybe because that’s not a concern in many
I’m increasingly seeing a lot of technical and business writing make heavy use of bold font weights, in an attempt to emphasize what the writers think is important. LLMs seem to have picked up and spread this practice widely. But most of this is self-defeating, the more a writer uses typographical emphasis, the less power
I’ve spent a couple of days at a Thoughtworks-organized event in Deer Valley Utah. It was my favorite kind of event, a really great set of attendees in an Open Space format. These kinds of events are full of ideas, which I do want to share, but I can’t truthfully form them into a coherent
The number of options we have to configure and enrich a coding agent’s context has exploded over the past few months. Claude Code is leading the charge with innovations in this space, but other coding assistants are quickly following suit. Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of these tools.