Charity Majors

Charity Majors values this work as a necessary, comprehensive update that addresses the rapid evolution of the observability field and the impact of AI.

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Charity Majors9d

If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?

Brilliant jerks, ZIRP-era managers, and how psychological safety lost the plot. Part 3 of my conversation with Dr. Cat Hicks.

Charity Majors12d

Fragments: walking the same path as the Krell, Ola Bini banished, interviewed at

Fragments: walking the same path as the Krell, Ola Bini banished, interviewed at DDD Europe with Eric Evans, future of reading code, latest Google model knows less, but pretends less martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors17d

If it's common knowledge why are the vast majority of talks I watch not doing it

If it's common knowledge why are the vast majority of talks I watch not doing it?

Charity Majors17d

When slides earn their place they work as a visual channel that complements the

When slides earn their place they work as a visual channel that complements the speaker rather than replacing them - Sumeet Gayathri Moghe sets out the resulting principles. martinfowler.com/articles/nev...

Charity Majors18d

Sensible Defaults: do these practices, or do better, and be prepared to explain

Sensible Defaults: do these practices, or do better, and be prepared to explain why you've chosen some other way. martinfowler.com/bliki/Sensib...

Charity Majors18d

Fragments: agents make programming harder, creating a breakaway agent needs supe

Fragments: agents make programming harder, creating a breakaway agent needs super-persistence, AI needs a conscience more than consciousness, theses on AI regulation martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors22d

I don't understand how that one can even be a thing. If you vote in favor, we do

I don't understand how that one can even be a thing. If you vote in favor, we do nothing; if you vote against, we blow up the world.

Charity Majors23d

Fragments: the risk from AI is wiring it into everything, colorful syntax highli

Fragments: the risk from AI is wiring it into everything, colorful syntax highlighting impedes comprehension, what Forward Deployed Engineer should mean martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors23d

NEW POST Human collaboration improves with feedback, but not obvious to do well

NEW POST Human collaboration improves with feedback, but not obvious to do well. Anuja Karnik and Sumeet Gayathri Moghe pass on a bevy of tips, based on the principle that both praise and criticism should be seen as positive. martinfowler.com/articles/hea...

Charity Majors26d

Where do AI norms come from?

A dialogue with Dr Cat Hicks on ethics, learning, and what we owe each other. Part one: start by listening.

Charity Majors1mo

NEW POST I see AI and LLMs as bringing a mix of boons and banes, but one feelin

NEW POST I see AI and LLMs as bringing a mix of boons and banes, but one feeling dominates: not just are they pretending to be a person, but the kind of person I don't like. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Charity Majors1mo

Fragments: two worrying explanations around the RubyGems hack, agents aren't so

Fragments: two worrying explanations around the RubyGems hack, agents aren't so much super-intelligent as super-persistent, Uncle Bob's harness is obviated, regulation of AI and competition with China martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors1mo

NEW POST Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tang

NEW POST Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storyline. martinfowler.com/articles/nev...

Charity Majors1mo

Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob

A framework for thinking about when AI involvement is additive or a violation

Charity Majors1mo

We need to teach people never to use bare numbers, always declare a const 😉

Charity Majors1mo

I selected "recent" when I joined years ago (I don't see a "latest first"). It's

I selected "recent" when I joined years ago (I don't see a "latest first"). It's full of slop nonetheless.

Charity Majors1mo

NEW POST A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indic

NEW POST A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

Charity Majors1mo

Fragments: dealing with AI's counterfeit utility, exasperated readers of LLMs, m

Fragments: dealing with AI's counterfeit utility, exasperated readers of LLMs, missing Creating Passionate Users, agents lack Verum Factum, three people making key decisions on AI martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors1mo

NEW POST Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad

NEW POST Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks. He's started to write a series of posts on how to avoid these calamities, beginning with a post that questions whether a presentation is needed at all. martinfowler.com/articles/nev...

Charity Majors1mo

A few words on a slide work well (but no sentences). I like words + arrows to in

A few words on a slide work well (but no sentences). I like words + arrows to indicate relationships. I think of the slides as a complementary visual channel to my words: martinfowler.com/bliki/Visual.... It's ok to turn the visuals off when there isn't something to show (just warn the AV people...)

Charity Majors1mo

NEW POST Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how p

NEW POST Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Charity Majors1mo

Rachel's Ramblings: Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code: Or, perhaps t

Rachel's Ramblings: Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code: Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems martinfowler.com/rachels-ramb...

Charity Majors1mo

Fragments: LLM cliché highlighter, architecture for long-horizon autonomous agen

Fragments: LLM cliché highlighter, architecture for long-horizon autonomous agents, Continuous Integration and agents, AI-generated super-viruses, prolific academic ghosts martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors1mo

NEW POST In order to make AI effective, organizations need decent data. Pramod

NEW POST In order to make AI effective, organizations need decent data. Pramod Sadalage and Prem Chandrasekaran explain how: quality foundations, semantic context, clear access, and observability martinfowler.com/articles/mak...

Charity Majors1mo

Fragments: lack of AI whistleblowers, saving debris from AI bubble bursting, how

Fragments: lack of AI whistleblowers, saving debris from AI bubble bursting, how to decide to skip LinkedIn posts, agentic programming at Zalando, shredding US intelligence martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors1mo

Rachel's Ramblings: Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern - Why buildin

Rachel's Ramblings: Citizens Build, Agents Execute, Experts Govern - Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software martinfowler.com/rachels-ramb...

Charity Majors1mo

NEW POST Jim Highsmith explains that effective writing from a practitioner is a

NEW POST Jim Highsmith explains that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. martinfowler.com/articles/pra...

Charity Majors2mo

Fragments: introducing Rachel's Ramblings, XConf Europe, why no massive producti

Fragments: introducing Rachel's Ramblings, XConf Europe, why no massive productivity gains from AI yet, visualizing election data, safety challenge from AI, impact of AI in China martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors2mo

Fragments: responsibility for rogue agents, indicators of a bubble bursting, dre

Fragments: responsibility for rogue agents, indicators of a bubble bursting, dread of AI, praise for gov.uk, getting data out of closed packages, eyes on Clacton martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors2mo

NEW POST Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a lar

NEW POST Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Charity Majors2mo

NEW POST Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahu

NEW POST Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that what really matters is protecting the orchestrator's context. martinfowler.com/articles/orc...

Charity Majors2mo

I agree that there's room for work on fundamental patterns here, and that it's v

I agree that there's room for work on fundamental patterns here, and that it's very interesting. However I also think it's too early to write down much that will be long-lasting.

Charity Majors2mo

Fragments: mismatched views of AI between engineering and C-suite, comparing dot

Fragments: mismatched views of AI between engineering and C-suite, comparing dotcom and AI bubbles, LLMs build it we run it, law professors prefer LLM answers, using DSLs with LLMs, the stench of LLM-speak martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors3mo

NEW POST Nik Malykhin needed to run a Java 1.5 codebase on today's hardware. Hi

NEW POST Nik Malykhin needed to run a Java 1.5 codebase on today's hardware. His initial try to use LLMs wasn't helpful, but he made progress when he guided the process with careful steps. martinfowler.com/articles/arc...

Charity Majors3mo

NEW POST LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactl

NEW POST LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Unmesh Joshi shares his experience using abstractions and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to provide a strong harness to guide an LLM. martinfowler.com/articles/llm...

Charity Majors3mo

It reminds me of Jason Koebler's post: www.404media.co/your-ai-use-...

Charity Majors3mo

I haven't tried to get it to write anything (for lots of reasons). I have recent

I haven't tried to get it to write anything (for lots of reasons). I have recently come across more submissions from other people that reek of LLM-speak. I find after a page or so of it I just want to toss it aside.

Charity Majors3mo

Fragments: FOSD discussions on harness engineering, self-hosting models, grand n

Fragments: FOSD discussions on harness engineering, self-hosting models, grand narrative, and bringing rocks. Saving money with fable, bleak future for developer education, does electron have a future, interactional and contributory expertise. martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors3mo

Have you heard? Clickhouse is winning the observability wars!

Years ago I predicted that columnar storage would remake observability. What I didn't see coming: vendors would build it, nerf it, and sell a worse version back to you as "Datadog, but cheaper"

Charity Majors3mo

NEW POST After setting out her factors of viability, @birgitta410.bsky.social n

NEW POST After setting out her factors of viability, @birgitta410.bsky.social now reports on her experiences with local LLMs for programming. She compares them with two standard tasks and tries the best LLM in day-to-day use martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Charity Majors3mo

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social recently spent some time trying out running l

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social recently spent some time trying out running local LLMs for some programming tasks. In this memo she outlines the factors that influence how viable they are for the job. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

Charity Majors3mo

🙃

Charity Majors3mo

Fragments: Second future of software development retreat, ethics of working with

Fragments: Second future of software development retreat, ethics of working with AI, censorship via DMCA, reacting to the high cost of tokens, a radical document in 1776 martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors3mo

Thanks - fixed

Charity Majors3mo

In defense of AI mandates

When you need to execute a coordinated change on a tight timeline, a mandate is the best and most honest way to fund it.

Charity Majors3mo

Is it ethical to use AI?

On externalities and engagement, the problem with purity politics, and why we need to make AI boring again

Charity Majors4mo

NEW POST We've used AI with Bayer to help pharmaceutical researchers query deca

NEW POST We've used AI with Bayer to help pharmaceutical researchers query decades of information buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes the evolution from keyword-based search to a research assistant that can draft regulatory reports martinfowler.com/articles/rel...

Charity Majors4mo

Fragments: enjoying programming with LLMs, four types of LLM conversation, the c

Fragments: enjoying programming with LLMs, four types of LLM conversation, the crevasse between AI enthusiasts and skeptics, AI companies get product/market fit, the need for decentralization martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors4mo

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.

Charity Majors4mo

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy

Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here's how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.

Charity Majors4mo

www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/16/k...

Charity Majors4mo

Fragments: Dodgy metrics for AI usage, history of tech removing jobs, benchmarki

Fragments: Dodgy metrics for AI usage, history of tech removing jobs, benchmarking closed and open models, LLMs multiply existing cruft, AI slop driving us crazy, I am the Global Interpreter Lock for agents martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors4mo

It's not writing, it's a whole new communications paradigm 😉

Charity Majors4mo

Fragments:GOTO chat with Kent Beck, using AI to help restructure a gnarly codeba

Fragments:GOTO chat with Kent Beck, using AI to help restructure a gnarly codebase, open-source and security, cognitive endurance, Gen Z future with AI, impact of AI on jobs, fumbling AI regulation martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors4mo

NEW § @birgitta410.bsky.social finishes her post on sensors for coding agents b

NEW § @birgitta410.bsky.social finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. martinfowler.com/articles/sen...

Charity Majors4mo

NEW POST Four of my colleagues share their experiences in applying good securit

NEW POST Four of my colleagues share their experiences in applying good security practices to vibe coding. martinfowler.com/articles/vib...

Charity Majors4mo

We will miss you too. ❤️❤️

Charity Majors5mo

NEW § @birgitta410.bsky.social adds exploration of three sensors for static cod

NEW § @birgitta410.bsky.social adds exploration of three sensors for static code analysis, with mixed results. Computational sensors alone cannot help us much, AI is needed to add semantic interpretation, and consider trade-offs. martinfowler.com/articles/sen...

Charity Majors5mo

Glad you found it helpful, but the author is @birgitta410.bsky.social - so she s

Glad you found it helpful, but the author is @birgitta410.bsky.social - so she should get the credit. I'm just the publisher.

Charity Majors5mo

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social begins an article about her experiences with

NEW POST @birgitta410.bsky.social begins an article about her experiences with sensors in an agent harness. This first part looks at static analysis with basic code linting. martinfowler.com/articles/sen...

Charity Majors5mo

Fragments: thoughts from a software development retreat, would I be a writer wit

Fragments: thoughts from a software development retreat, would I be a writer without text editors, use LLMs as functions, don't use LLM skills, is the future of everything lies? martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors5mo

True, but the cost and latency of doing that means that it rarely gets done.

Charity Majors5mo

NEW POST When I need to feed an LLM a lot of context, I can write it myself, or

NEW POST When I need to feed an LLM a lot of context, I can write it myself, or I can get an LLM to interview me for it. martinfowler.com/bliki/Interr...

Charity Majors5mo

NEW POST Will there be source code in the future? To wrestle with this, we have

NEW POST Will there be source code in the future? To wrestle with this, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: instructions to a machine and a conceptual model of the problem domain. martinfowler.com/articles/wha...

Charity Majors5mo

Thanks for letting me know, I've added it: willemvandenende.com/blog/enginee...

Charity Majors5mo

Fragments: open-source framework for prompting patterns, musician sues google fo

Fragments: open-source framework for prompting patterns, musician sues google for defamation, apple is thinking differently about AI spending, running LLMs locally, will The Genie be caught in the tar pit? martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors5mo

Fragments: updated guide on AI coding, video on harness engineering, how long sh

Fragments: updated guide on AI coding, video on harness engineering, how long should a function be, the problems of Software Brain and why AI is unpopular martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors5mo

NEW POST Thoughtworks internal IT use a workflow for agentic programming called

NEW POST Thoughtworks internal IT use a workflow for agentic programming called Structured-Prompt-Driven Development (SPDD). Wei Zhang and Jessie Jie Xia describe how this works with a simple example with details in a github project. martinfowler.com/articles/str...

Charity Majors5mo

Fragments: 34th Thoughtworks Technology Radar, what happens when developers don'

Fragments: 34th Thoughtworks Technology Radar, what happens when developers don't read the LLM's code, DirectFile and tech in large organizations martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors6mo

No disrespect - but that's not a terribly high bar!

Charity Majors6mo

Fragments: pragmatic summit video with Kent and Gergely, virtue of laziness, TDD

Fragments: pragmatic summit video with Kent and Gergely, virtue of laziness, TDD and prompts, inspiration from Dark Star martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors6mo

Yea - you did it 🎉 Congratulations to the people of Hungary.

Charity Majors6mo

Good luck to you and your fellow Hungarians. Orbán has been a stain on Europe fo

Good luck to you and your fellow Hungarians. Orbán has been a stain on Europe for years. Let's hope you finally get rid of him.

Charity Majors6mo

Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the C

Last night I saw Central Square Theater’s excellent production of Breaking the Code. It’s about Alan Turing, who made a monumental contribution to both my profession and the fate of free democracies. Worth seeing if you’re in the Boston area this month. www.centralsquaretheater.org/shows/breaki...

Charity Majors6mo

Fragments: two podcasts, a worryingly well-done supply-chain attack, framework f

Fragments: two podcasts, a worryingly well-done supply-chain attack, framework for tech documentation, and a particularly thoughtful AI coding experience martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors6mo

For me, the *only* objective in writing is #1. I consider #2 and #3 as welcome s

For me, the *only* objective in writing is #1. I consider #2 and #3 as welcome side-effects. And I say this knowing that #3 is what pays the bills.

Charity Majors6mo

NEW POST Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted

NEW POST Rahul Garg finishes his series on reducing the friction in AI-Assisted Development with a structured practice that feeds back learnings from AI sessions into the team's shared artifacts, turning individual experience into collective improvement. martinfowler.com/articles/red...

Charity Majors6mo

original post deleted due to errors in attribution. Replacement at: bsky.app/pro

original post deleted due to errors in attribution. Replacement at: bsky.app/profile/mart...

Charity Majors6mo

NEW POST Modern hardware is fast, but software often fails to leverage it. @wit

NEW POST Modern hardware is fast, but software often fails to leverage it. @withcaer.com guides their work with mechanical sympathy. They distill this into principles: predictable memory access, awareness of cache lines, single-writer, natural batching martinfowler.com/articles/mec...

Charity Majors6mo

Fragments: three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expen

Fragments: three layers of system health, AI as cognitive system 3, what's expensive if agents make coding free, and the future of source code martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

Charity Majors7mo

Your Data Is Made Powerful By Context (so stop destroying it already)

In logs as in life, the relationships are the most important part. AI doesn't fix this. It makes it worse.

Charity Majors7mo

My (hypothetical) SRECon26 keynote

One year ago, Fred Hebert and I delivered the closing keynote at SRECon25. Looking back on it now, I can hardly connect with how I felt then. Here's what I'd say one year later.

Charity Majors8mo

First I wrote the wrong book, then I wrote the right book

I'm not sure whether to say "thank you" or "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME", but this one goes out to all the people who sent me advice on buying software last fall.

Charity Majors8mo

Martin Fowler told me the second edition should be shorter (it's twice as long)

90% new material, a clearer mission, and a rogues gallery of contributors. The second edition of Observability Engineering is almost done.

Charity Majors9mo

Bring Back Ops Pride

"Operations" is not a dirty word, a synonym for toil, or a title for people who can't write code. May those who shit on ops get the operational outcomes they deserve.

Charity Majors9mo

On Friday Deploys: Sometimes that Puppy Needs Murdering

It's the most wonderful time of the year: the pie, the eggnog, the eternal debates over whether deploy freezes cause more harm than good. 🤶🌲

Charity Majors10mo

Hello World

On platform choices, professional responsibilities, and picking your battles

Charity Majors10mo

Moving from WordPress to Substack

After a decade on WordPress, it's time to try something new.

Charity Majors10mo

From Cloudwashing to O11ywashing

I just watched a panel where tech execs nodded along as someone described the original definition of observability as an "unsolved problem" they had to build custom tooling for. My head exploded.

Charity Majors11mo

How many pillars of observability can you fit on the head of a pin?

The "three pillars" are a lie that keep good engineers trapped inside a mental model from the 1980s, paying outrageous sums of money for tooling that can't keep up with the complexity of modern systems.

Charity Majors12mo

Got opinions on observability? I could use your help (once more, with feeling)

No, I haven't finished writing the book yet. Yes, I have more questions. Please? 🙏🌈✨

Charity Majors13mo

Are you an experienced software buyer? I could use some help.

Writing the second edition of "Observability Engineering" and I'm a bit out of my depth. Send me your stories?

Charity Majors15mo

How We Migrated the Parse API From Ruby to Golang (Resurrected)

I wrote a lot of blog posts over my time at Parse, but they all evaporated after Facebook killed the product. Most of them I didn’t care about, but I was mad about losing one of them: a retrospective of the grueling, murderous two-year rewrite of our entire API from Ruby on Rails to Golang..

Charity Majors15mo

Thoughts on Motivation and My 40-Year Career

The struggle is what brings your ideals to life, and other thoughts on what turns a rebellious little shit into a committed institutionalist.

Charity Majors59mo

Sampling, verbosity, and the case for (much) broader applications of distributed tracing

Charity Majors66mo

Why Tracing Might Replace (Almost) All Logging

Charity Majors67mo

The Two Drivers of Cardinality (and what to do about them)

Charity Majors67mo

Observability will never replace Monitoring (… because it shouldn’t)

Charity Majors67mo

Deep Stacks Versus Deep Systems

Charity Majors67mo

APM Is Dying

Charity Majors67mo

The “Three Pillars of observability” that weren’t

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