Fragments: August 18
Fragments: August 18
Martin Fowler: 18 Aug 2026
Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard work of building such an organization. So I rely on working with people who are prepared to actually put the effort in. A key partner in all of this is Rachel Laycock, who is the global CTO of Thoughtworks.
Not just is she far better than me at running a technology organization, she’s also a keen observer and connector of ideas. I’ve been urging her to write these down, even if her busy schedule makes it difficult for her to compose them into something substantial.
Happily she’s starting writing “Rachel’s Ramblings”
Fast, imperfect, thinking out loud. Naming ideas early rather than waiting until they’re fully formed. Because the reality is, most of what I do day to day isn’t answering known questions. It’s spotting patterns and asking questions we haven’t quite figured out yet.
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My colleagues in Europe are organizing XConf Europe in London on September 11th.
The sessions examine what happens when agentic systems meet compliance, how to run sovereign models, performance patterns in data migrations and how to safely navigate legacy codebases. Lu Wilson will give a keynote on ‘Jam-oriented programming’.
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Noah Smith recognizes the high usage of AI, and its impressive feats - but also that there aren’t signs of massive productivity growth or job losses. This may be the calm before the storm, but Smith thinks there may something else in play. He quotes a metaphor from François Chollet
One of the biggest misconceptions people have about intelligence is seeing it as some kind of unbounded scalar stat, like height. “Future AI will have 10,000 IQ”, that sort of thing. Intelligence is a conversion ratio, with an optimality bound. Increasing intelligence is not so much like “making the tower taller”, it’s more like “making the ball rounder”. At some point it’s already pretty damn spherical and any improvement is marginal.
The thought here is that intelligence in the sense that we know it, isn’t something where there’s a lot of room for massive improvement. That doesn’t mean AI won’t be “smarter” than us in other respects, after all even without AI my computer is better at me than remembering what I’ve agreed to do over the next six months.
But even if AI doesn’t get smarter than humans, it can gain by being more replicable. Not just does this make it cheaper to use, perhaps more importantly it makes it more responsive. While I might harrumph at how slowly The Genie responds to my queries, it’s still far faster than contacting a human.
Smith continues by surmising that AI may be able to make sense of phenomena that can’t be reduced to simple laws, but can only be understood by something able to comprehend a multitude of details:
there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate.
His thought is that even if there isn’t any space for AI to get more intelligent than humans along the lines we are used to, that they can open up new directions. As well as these cloud laws he also thinks that AI can understand human systems that rely on the kind of tacit, distributed knowledge that human organizations build up over time.
My take-away here is that AI won’t seem more intelligent in the way that we typically frame intelligent, but more intelligent in different ways. The converse of which is that the human value comes in artfully combining our human nature with these new spells that The Genie can cast.
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Especially in our profession, we’ve seen increasing emphasis on the importance of data. However I’ve observed that most people still struggle to understand the message data is telling us. One of the reasons I’m interested in election forecasting is in how they communicate their insights, especially since so many people have difficulty with probabilistic forecasts. (I often wonder how much being a board-gamer has helped me be comfortable with this, all that time interacting with Combat Results Tables in my youth must have benefited me somehow.)
50+1 (one of the successors of 538) have published a little explainer on how they designed their 2026 election forecast page. There’s a good discussion of the logic behind their simulation histogram, I like how they use a text annotation to explain one point, giving the reader enough guidance to understand the rest of the graphic. They also...