Martin Fowler

Martin Fowler's answer to whether AI is an economic bubble, given in his August 2025 post on LLMs and software development, was "BIEN SÛR QUE C'EST UNE BULLE": of course it is. He placed it alongside canals, railways and the internet, said the burst is near-certain and the timing unknowable, and noted that Amazon came out of the dot-com collapse intact. That combination, a flat verdict paired with a refusal to forecast, recurs across everything attributed to him here.

He works at «ThoughtWorks» and edits martinfowler.com, where Sumeet Gayathri Moghe published the «Never Send The Slides» series; the term "infodeck", the second rung of Moghe's five-artefact ladder, is Fowler's. He created the concept of bounded contexts.

His sharpest methodological claim borrows from Rebecca Parsons: hallucination is not a defect but what an LLM does, and some of its output happens to be useful. The practical consequence he draws is to ask the same question several times and read the variance. He also attacks current AI surveys for lumping together autocomplete users and people who let models read and edit source directly, and worries the resulting data pushes practitioners toward bad habits.

At the «Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat» he observed that senior developers are largely optimistic, a third of initial sceptics flipped after hands-on exercises, and mid-level developers are the exposed group: careers built pre-LLM, without the architectural judgement needed to supervise agents. He called OpenAI's harness engineering a valuable framing.