Post by **Rachel Laycock**, CTO of **Thoughtworks**, published on **September 2, 2026** on *Rachel's Ramblings*, the martinfowler.com section she runs, roughly **8,000 characters**. The text is a **deliberate response** to [[houck-dx-what-are-code-reviews-for-2026-08-05]], following a public disagreement between the two authors on a **Code Remix** panel hosted by **Moderne**. Laycock accepts Houck's quantified diagnosis (+**106%** lines per diff at **Meta**, +**64%** median PR size on the DX side) and the list of non-defect-finding functions of review, then shifts the question: *« why are we waiting until code review to do all of those things? »* (A) The guiding principle is the shortening of feedback loops learned at Thoughtworks — if feedback has value, don't remove it, move it closer to the decision it informs. Each function attributed to review is reassigned upstream: exploring alternatives before implementation, knowledge transfer through **pair programming**, collective ownership through **mob programming** and team design sessions, architectural alignment through shared design followed by **fitness functions**, and automation of everything deterministic — *« We really shouldn't still be arguing about whitespace in 2026. »* (B) Exception-based review replaces systematic review: a fundamental architectural change, a sensitive security boundary, a large blast radius, an unfamiliar area of a critical system, or simply a team's declared lack of confidence. (1) Automating review with an agent that mimics the human reviewer is dismissed as *« automating the ceremony rather than questioning why the ceremony exists »*. (2) Houck's cognitive debt is acknowledged as real, but the mandatory PR is judged a weak defense: *« We need engineers to understand systems, not diffs. »*
#code review#exception-based review#pull request
Rachel Laycock · CTO de Thoughtworks · sur *Rachel's Ramblings* (martinfowler.com).
Product announcement post from **Block Engineering** signed by **Thomas Petersen** (*Principal Designer & Builder*), published on **August 18, 2026**, ~1,800 words across thirteen short sections, introducing **Buzz Projects** — a **software forge hosted on its own relay**: Git repositories, branches, pull requests, issues, review and merge, multi-repo projects, an activity feed, all linked to conversation channels. The post's standfirst and thesis: *« Coding agents are the terminal for your computer. Buzz is the terminal for your network. »* Three contributions. **(A) A trust doctrine grounded in *ex post* proof rather than *ex ante* authorization**: on one side *« No forced guardrails, no limitations on what your agents are allowed to help you with »*, on the other *« Every push, review, approval, and merge is a signed Nostr event. If an agent authors a patch, you can see which agent produced it and which human authorized that agent to act »*; the section closes on a stated direction — *« we are already exploring ideas around agent trust protocols informed by past behavior »*. **(B) Git interoperability without proprietary tooling**: *« These are standard git repositories… You can fetch, clone, pull, and push over plain Smart HTTP, with no custom tooling or wrapper CLI required »*, with the clé Nostr serving as a single identity — *« The same npub that signs your messages signs your pushes. »* **(C) A distinction between execution surface and network presence**: *« A terminal gives an agent somewhere to execute commands and change files, but it does not give it a persistent place in the network. Buzz does. »* The post produces no figures and contains no outbound links; it qualifies itself as preliminary six times (*« still very basic »*, *« fairly elementary »*, *« still under experiments »*), and Projects lives under the **Experiments** tab of Buzz Desktop.
#Buzz#Buzz Projects#Block
**Thomas Petersen** — *« Principal Designer & Builder »* chez **Block** · auteur unique et signataire du billet ; première apparition dans le corpus. Publié le **18 août 2026** sur le blog **Block Engineering**. Troisième signature Block sur Buzz en un mois · après Tyler Longwell (21 juillet) et Atish Patel (6 août) · et la première non-ingénieur.