Finding Comfort in the Uncertainty – Annie Vella
February 19, 2026
About 40 of us – practitioners, researchers, technical leaders from around the world – gathered in Deer Valley, Utah, for an invite-only retreat on the future of software development. The event was hosted by Martin Fowler and Thoughtworks, and held in the same mountains where the Agile Manifesto was written 25 years ago – with some of the original signatories in the room. Not an attempt to reproduce that moment, but an acknowledgement that the ground has shifted enough to warrant the same kind of conversation.
The format was an unconference. No presentations. No agenda handed down from above. Participants proposed sessions, voted with their feet, and talked. Over 30 sessions ran in parallel – far more than any one person could attend. The ones I was in were fascinating, and comparing notes with others afterwards revealed just how much convergence there was across sessions I’d missed. A long way to go for two days – but worth every hour.
Recently, Martin Fowler, a giant in the field of software engineering and one of the originators of the Agile movement hosted a symposium, for want of a better word, on the future of software engineering in this era of AI and large language models.
Here Annie Vella, who will be speaking at our upcoming AI engineer conference in Melbourne, gives her write-up of what she took away from this event.
This is very much worth your time reading.
Fowler he himself has a write-up from his responses to the event.
