Production Is Where the Rigor Goes

In early February, Martin Fowler and the good folks at Thoughtworks sponsored a small, invite-only unconference in Deer Valley, Utah—birthplace of the Agile Manifesto—to talk about how software engineering is changing in the AI-native era.

This document represents an almost incalculable amount of engineering skill, practical expertise, and battle-hardened wisdom, from some of the leading voices and actual titans in our field. It’s also a fascinating capsule of where the industry is at in this weird, compressed moment of change, from people who aren’t trying to sell you anything.

Across decades of software evolution, the same misunderstanding keeps recurring. Constraint removal is mistaken for loss of rigor. But what actually happens, when things go well, is rigor relocation.

Control doesn’t disappear. It moves closer to reality.

If [code] generation gets easier, judgment must get stricter. Otherwise, you’re not engineering anymore.

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