10th May 2026 - Link Blog
Mythical Man Month. Martin Fowler highlights this key idea from The Mythical Man-Month (Fred Brooks, 1975, still impressively relevant 50 years later):
I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas.
Conceptual integrity is exactly the missing piece I've been trying to nail down in understanding why being able to spit out new features so quickly offers new challenges when working with coding agents.
Recent articles
- Claude Opus 4.8: "a modest but tangible improvement" - 28th May 2026
- I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit - 27th May 2026
- Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI - 25th May 2026