How AI will change software engineering – with Martin Fowler

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In this episode

Martin Fowler is one of the most influential people within software architecture, and the broader tech industry. He is the Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks and the author of Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and several other books. He has spent decades shaping how engineers think about design, architecture, and process, and regularly publishes on his blog, MartinFowler.com.

In this episode, we discuss how AI is changing software development: the shift from deterministic to non-deterministic coding; where generative models help with legacy code; and the narrow but useful cases for vibe coding. Martin explains why LLM output must be tested rigorously, why refactoring is more important than ever, and how combining AI tools with deterministic techniques may be what engineering teams need.

We also revisit the origins of the Agile Manifesto and talk about why, despite rapid changes in tooling and workflows, the skills that make a great engineer remain largely unchanged.

Interesting quotes from the episode

On what non-determinism introduced by LLMs will mean for software engineering:

Gergely: “Is this the first time we’re seeing a tool that is so wide to certain software engineering that is non-deterministic?”

Martin: “It’s a whole new way of thinking. It’s got some interesting parallels to other forms of engineering.

In other forms of engineering, you think in terms of tolerances. My wife’s a structural engineer. She always thinks in terms of what are the tolerances, how much extra stuff do I