Thoughtworks

Founded in 1993, Thoughtworks carries a lineage of XP, continuous delivery, microservices and refactoring, and its people keep converting that lineage into positions on AI-assisted development. Martin Fowler, Birgitta Böckeler, Rachel Laycock and Sumeet Gayathri Moghe all publish from inside the same firm, which is why one vocabulary surfaces across otherwise unrelated arguments: short feedback loops, pair programming, trunk-based development, fitness functions.

The sequence is legible by date. Matt Kamelman named the economic shift in December 2025, calling it Service-as-Software: agents priced on demonstrated alignment and impact rather than seats. Fowler reported from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat in February 2026, where a third of the initially sceptical senior developers changed their minds after hands-on exercises. Böckeler formalised harness engineering in April 2026, separating guides (feedforward) from sensors (feedback). In May 2026 the firm packaged the doctrine as AI/works™, asserting that the breakthrough is the economics and predicting that systems "finally stop aging". The positioning is combative: "no consultant crowds", "stands on an engineering foundation rather than enthusiasm".

Laycock, as CTO, then argued in September 2026 that mandatory code review is a weak defence against AI-generated volume, reassigning each function of review to pairing, shared design, team boundaries and fitness functions. She reserves review for exceptions.

The unresolved part sits inside the firm: a platform that regenerates code from a Super Spec, and a CTO who insists engineers must understand systems rather than diffs.