Rob Bowley

Lots of new followers so thought I'd do an intro 🙂 This is me, without hat, in my garden, on a rainy morning in Manchester 🐝, UK Been working in tech for 25 years - software engineer then various leadership roles. Nowadays I'm a product & tech leadership advisor, coach, consultant. 1/4

The state of euphoria I'm getting from finally, after many yeats, working out how to fix our fitted fridge door catching when it closes is unrivalled. Possibly only the birth of first child beats it

Nature is healing. techcrunch.com/2026/10/19/p...

Is there a positive to this that whilst the WWW seems to have pushed everyone into extreme bubbles, LLMs will turn everyone into centrist dads

Pint of Aperol spritz after work. Novelty of having a client in Venice hasn't worn off.

The mechanism of coding was largely solved by the mid-1960s: we knew how to tell a machine to do anything computable. What wasn’t solved, and arguably can’t be, is knowing what to tell it, confirming it’s right and keeping it right as requirements shift.

Margaret Hamilton, trailblazer whose software powered Apollo 11 moon landing, dies at 90

Someone just said to me: "AI is like Jesus. I like him, just not his followers." Serious contendor for quote of the decade

I've published detailed notes and an annotated transcript to accompany the video of the keynote I gave at @wearedevelopers.bsky.social World Congress North America in San Jose on Friday - here's my rundown of everything that's happened with LLMs in 2026 so far simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/27/...

A good reminder to (re)read No Silver Bullet. Tools shrink accidental complexity; essential complexity remains.

I made it into Martin Fowler's Fragments again 😍

If your primary objective with AI is anything but learning faster, you're spending a lot of time optimising the wrong thing. Progress moves at the speed of its slowest step. For knowledge work, that step is understanding. It always has been.

Learning how to use Ableton (music creation software). It is like being in the cockpit of a space shuttle

Getting busier with busywork example of the week

NEW POST I see AI and LLMs as bringing a mix of boons and banes, but one feeling dominates: not just are they pretending to be a person, but the kind of person I don't like. martinfowler.com/articles/202...

This Coxon guy who has managed to get on every major news channel over the last week now saying the risks of global warming have been overstated pretty much tells you everything you need to know

Very good read, "Why Software Factories Fail"

I rant, therefore I am. richardwbown.com/when-softwar...

My god, I am TIRED of orgs constantly doing this pendulum swing. 25+ yrs in the industry, some things never change www.techradar.com/pro/meta-is-...

“But how did the superintelligence gain access to all of our infrastructure and private data!?” “You’d never guess it, but we gave it privileged access to all of our infrastructure and private data.”

Half my feed is AI doom takes, when the risk most of us actually face in the near future is not a rogue superintelligence.

Hard relate

Really interesting article I just came across. Automating part of programming isn't new, and it has never removed a phase - the work gets absorbed and moves. It's about the 1950s, but the authors draw the line straight to AI coding today.

Rachel's Ramblings: Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code: Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems martinfowler.com/rachels-ramb...

Only taken 25+ yrs of domesticity to learn non-stick pans a complete waste of money Spend a fortune on fancy Le Creuset, still landfill in 5yrs Get quality stainless steel, can scrub with wire wool, stick in dishwasher, will last a lifetime + not had issues with stuff sticking if pre-heat properly

CGI in movies peaked with Jurassic Park. Can't think of a heavily CGI movie I rate since. Watching Gladiator 2 coz on Netflix, first scene haeavily CGI boat battle, is just meh.

Write-up on the giga-outage and more from GitHub. Every chart I have seen internally too is literally doing a hockeystick on growth. IMHO this is also a canary in the coalmine for many other systems and products who have an API github.blog/news-insight...

I wrote an essay about why I'm done using AI for coding, even if it costs me my job and career: brettcodes.com/im-done-usin... The basic gist is: AI made me a worse, apathetic programmer. I think it's bad for humanity, the planet, and the craft of software engineering. And I'm done using it.

I go on holiday for a few weeks and we've already moved on from Loop Engineering to Graph Engineering The half-life of a paradigm is getting shorter than my annual leave My prediction: neuro-symbolic engineering by the end of August, at which point we'll have gone full circle and reinvented Prolog