From Craft to Compliance.

The Next Two Years of Software Engineering

Exploring five critical questions shaping software engineering through 2026, with contrasting scenarios for each. These lenses help prepare for the evolving ...

Overcommitted | Software Engineering and Tech Careers Insights

Overcommitted is where passion for the craft meets real talk about software engineering—from pull request philosophy and technical debt strategy to imposter syndrome and continuous learning, we are engineers committed to growing together and sharing the honest, thoughtful conversations that make you better at your job and your life.

You have to beat the models at something

In 2025, I wrote that software engineers ought to be assessed by “value over replacement”: not how much money they made for their company, but how much they…

The Case for Software Craftsmanship in the Era of Vibes

From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.

imput

We develop private, efficient, and respectful software. We also do security research, reverse engineering, and develop network services.

Laws of Software Engineering

A collection of principles and patterns that shape software systems, teams, and decisions.

Opinion | The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun

We’re entering a new renaissance of software development. We should all be excited, despite the uncertainties that lie ahead.

Opinion | The A.I. Disruption Has Arrived, and It Sure Is Fun

We’re entering a new renaissance of software development. We should all be excited, despite the uncertainties that lie ahead.

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source...

Despite widespread adoption, the impact of AI tools on software development in the wild remains understudied. We conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to understand how AI tools at the...

2026-04-25

Thoughts about design, code, technology and everything in between.

Prediction: AI will make formal verification go mainstream — Martin Kleppmann’s blog

Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream.

Roadmap: Open Source

After years of investing in open source software, we’re releasing our thinking on what positions these companies as emerging technology giants.

Software Engineering Productivity Research - Home

X : What are you interested in? Me : Wow, that varies constantly. Right now? There are a number of topics that I'm actively pursuing … a) When we talk about software engineering we typically think… | Simon Wardley

X : What are you interested in? Me : Wow, that varies constantly. Right now? There are a number of topics that I'm actively pursuing … a) When we talk about software engineering we typically think about the active part of creating code but software development is currently practised as a craft not an engineering discipline. The only engineering discipline in software engineering is testing. This creates a flaw in the comparison with using AI to code because development itself has never been optimised. If all we have to do is write code and we can automate that part then we can just replace those expensive typists with LLMs but development should be, and has the capability to become an engineering discipline. It's just not that for now. https://lnkd.in/eSRprhbf b) Most people talking digital sovereignty are doing so with good intentions but they literally have no idea what they are talking about. This is not because they are daft or foolish but because they cannot see the environment they are talking about. They are like generals talking about territorial sovereignty with no idea of what territory is or how you represent it. https://lnkd.in/eku2X_Ea c) Architectural decisions are made in code and not in the diagrams we create. Those architectural diagrams are more like prompts, wishes and beliefs of what a system should be but rarely reflect the actual system. This creates additional problems when the real architectural decisions are made by coders but coding itself is a craft not an engineering discipline. d) The current crop of LLMs / LMMs are driving us towards a new theocracy. We can counter this through diversity, critical thinking and open approaches but that does mean we have to get to the point of all symbolic instructions being open. That includes the training data. Copyright is a distraction from the real issue that we don't know what the systems are being trained on. Guardrails are a post event kludge. https://lnkd.in/exJVmNvD e) The medium we use in conversational programming environments such as cursor and lovable (or what we call vibe coding when not looking at the code or Software Engineering + AI when looking at the code) appear to be flawed. We are focused on text not images. The change of medium changes the conversation, the corollary is the conversation we have around the screen and the one we have around the whiteboard. Same problem, different medium, different discussion. https://lnkd.in/e_W6b6z3 f) "Value" in consulting land is mostly theatre rather than something meaningful. There are many forms of value but often we fail to identify this, quantify it or even measure it. https://lnkd.in/eeNbR_VY g) Rewilding Software Engineering. To change software development into an engineering practice, we need to introduce two wolves - one that software engineering is a decision making process and secondly that we need to build tools for problems we are facing - https://lnkd.in/epyUnqgh

The future belongs to those who can refute AI, not just generate with AI

Why verification, not prompting, could shape the next decade of engineering