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
- Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code - 19th August 2026
- Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things - 16th August 2026
- Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face - 7th August 2026