Birgitta B

I recorded a conversation with Chris Ford about learnings from using computational sensors with a coding agent on an application, in particular static code analysis and test quality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLWOLmeHOSE

I tried to make sense of spec-driven development by looking at 3 tools: Amazon's Kiro, GitHub's spec-kit, and the Tessl Framework
https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-tools.html

One of the challenges with service templates is that once a team instantiated a service with a template, it’s tedious to feed template updates back to those services. I wonder if anchoring AI agents to a template or reference application could help make that easier? https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/anchoring-to-reference.html

To vibe or not to vibe? I wrote a new memo about the constant little risk assessments I make during AI-assisted coding, thinking about probability and impact if AI gets it wrong, and if I will be able to detect that. https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/to-vibe-or-not-vibe.html

We recently ran an experiment to explore how far GenAI can currently be pushed toward autonomously developing high-quality, up-to-date software without human intervention, and gather observations about where it breaks down.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/pushing-ai-autonomy.html

I've seen a surge of discussions recently about what feels like "vibe coding extreme", about large AI-generated change sets that are impossible to review by humans, leading to speculation if we even still need to care about the code in the future. I still care, and expect to continue to care, especially if I have to be on call for it https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/i-still-care-about-the-code.html

@iscarlosmolero@mastodon.social that’s what I do indeed when I lose control of AI, but what does a delivery manager do when everybody around them starts creating more throughput? I guess they can take the AI licensed away 😊

I wrote a guest post on The Pragmatic Engineer https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/two-years-of-using-ai rounding up 2 years of using AI coding assistants - how they evolved; ways of working; impact I see on speed, quality and team flow; and some thoughts on the future

In the past few weeks, a new surge of "background" coding agents came out. I wrote down an example of using OpenAI's Codex. If you haven't had a chance to look closer at these agents yet, this will hopefully help you understand better what they do under the hood, and which agent category they fall into.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/autonomous-agents-codex-example.html

When I code with an AI agent, as soon as I feel like I’m losing control and don’t understand the many changes anymore, I revert to the last checkpoint where I felt comfortable. I wonder what that will be like for the delivery managers and POs of the future - what will THEY do when things around them change so fast and erratically that they feel like losing control?

Good scope management is the linchpin of agile software delivery. Generative AI is like a scope chaos monkey, generating more code, more story details, more requirements than necessary

Oh! Committing a vibe coding session to a "real" codebase is like reviewing and refactoring a huge pull request by a beginner programmer. Actively driving and steering an agentic coding session is like pairing, where you give and get just-in-time code review on every small step.

New GenAI memo: What role do developer skills play in AI-assisted coding?
https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai.html#memo-13

After my mini rant about Vibe Coding yesterday, I'm following it up today with a list of examples of AI "missteps", illustrating how developer skills still very much matter in agent-assisted coding, and ideas how to mitigate that.

The way the term vibe coding was coined, became a meme, and then lost all meaning within just six or seven weeks is wild...

This is how I understood the original tweet by Andrej Karpathy:
- You don't look at the code.
- You just tell the AI what you want, maybe even using voice.
- You iterate via chat until it does what you meant.
- It's chaotic, fast, fun.
- "It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects."

🧵