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Rob Bowley

@robbowley.net
2.3K followers 1.2K following 5.6K posts

Product & Tech Leadership Advisor, Consultant, Coach & Mentor Tech, Software Development, Science, History, Economics, Politics blog.robbowley.net www.linkedin.com/in/robertbowley pragmaticpartners.co.uk Manchester, UK

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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 5h
Someone just said to me: "AI is like Jesus. I like him, just not his followers." Serious contendor for quote of the decade
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 28/09/2026
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/...
simonwillison.net
2026 in LLMs (so far)
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological …
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 25/09/2026
A good reminder to (re)read No Silver Bullet. Tools shrink accidental complexity; essential complexity remains.
X Quote Repost Screenshot:

François Chollet
@fchollet
I think the "difficulty" of software engineering is essentially constant no matter what abstraction level you move to, because human cognition adapts to new tools until it can fully utilize itself.

Tools are only affordances, not a magic wand that makes work disappear.

Great software engineering was immensely challenging before. It is still immensely challenging now, despite very different workflows.

Quote
Simon Willison
@simonw

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder

We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge x.com/gergelyorosz/s…
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 25/09/2026
I made it into Martin Fowler's Fragments again 😍
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 24/09/2026
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.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 22/09/2026
Learning how to use Ableton (music creation software). It is like being in the cockpit of a space shuttle
Ableton DAW interface
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 19/09/2026
There are always ways to jailbreak the safegaurds in the LLMs and cost yes I called that out in my article, but it will get cheaper e.g. Deepseak and also OS models getting better over time
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 19/09/2026
which is also evidenced on zerodayclock.com
zerodayclock.com
Zero Day Clock
A public scoreboard for vulnerability management and exploitation.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 19/09/2026
exploiting software flaws is now the top way attackers get in (31%, up from 20%), with AI cutting the time to exploit from months to hours. www.verizon.com/about/news/b...
verizon.com
Breach entry point, 2026 DBIR finds | About Verizon
The 2026 DBIR reveals that vulnerability exploitation has surpassed stolen credentials as the top breach entry point.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 19/09/2026
The UK's NCSC says AI will "almost certainly" increase the frequency and intensity of cyber threats up to 2027.
ncsc.gov.uk
Impact of AI on cyber threat from now to 2027
An NCSC assessment highlighting the impacts on cyber threat from AI developments between now and 2027.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
Getting busier with busywork example of the week
fortune.com
Shopify CEO says employees' 'slop grenades' are making more work for everyone else | Fortune
He said AI is helping workers produce more output, but the quality of it is so bad that their colleagues have to spend more time fixing it
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
Thx for your presentation deck btw sources were useful for my blog I think I cited at least one
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
On the increase in cyber attacks zerodayclock.com
zerodayclock.com
Zero Day Clock
A public scoreboard for vulnerability management and exploitation.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
Lol the anger not just me then. Get you re LLMs making it hard to do bad things (unless guardrails intentionally removed e.g. huggingface) but I don't think will be long b4 won't take much to build an LLM without any and just use more brute force
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
Also orgs are getting fast and loose wiring agents into their systems as fast as they can, chasing promised productivity, building on something we don’t know how to contain, and shipping it to everyone while we work it out.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
At least it's out of my head now, but I'm genuinely worried, particularly for the tsunami of cyber attacks I see coming
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
It has all been making me really angry – the media lapping it up and letting it go unchallenged. So angry I’ve been struggling to be coherent in collecting my thoughts on it all. Every time I think I’m there another sensational headline or take comes up and I’m flipping tables in my head again.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 18/09/2026
A fortnight of headlines about AI killing us all, and the thing actually coming at us is getting little attention as a result. It's not the models getting smarter, it's that we're wiring them up to everything, and nobody has worked out how to do that safely yet. blog.robbowley.net/2026/09/18/t...
blog.robbowley.net
The AI threat is real, it just isn’t the one in the headlines | Rob Bowley
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Martin Fowler @martinfowler.com · 17/09/2026
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...
martinfowler.com
I don't like LLMs
a short post
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 17/09/2026
Of course the BBC have now updated the headline. BBC News - Uncontrolled AI could lead to 'silicon species' rivalling humans, warns Microsoft - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
bbc.co.uk
Uncontrolled AI could lead to 'silicon species' rivalling humans, warns Microsoft
Mustafa Suleyman says he believes rival AI firm Anthropic is in effect teaching Claude it "may be conscious".
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 17/09/2026
His words are full of contradictions and i find the whole exitential risk stuff a massive distraction from the risks with AI right now, quite to your point re how you have openclaw set up. There is a massive tsunami coming which I'm very worried about
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 17/09/2026
Microsoft's AI boss: don't anthropomorphise AI. Also him, same article: we're "seeding a new silicon species which will no doubt compete with us for resources, no matter how much it cares about humanity and loves us". A rule so important he couldn't follow it for one interview.
bbc.co.uk
Tech treating AI like humans is mistaken and misguided, Microsoft boss tells BBC
Mustafa Suleyman says he believes rival AI firm Anthropic is in effect teaching Claude it "may be conscious".
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 16/09/2026
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
Fox News Twitter, showing screenshot of interview with Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic researcher who says AI will kill us all, eventually:

@FoxNews
"I agree with President Trump's tweet that global warming doomsday scenarios were overplayed."

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon tells 
@seanhannity
 that past catastrophic warnings have amounted to "fear mongering," but argues AI is different because of how quickly the technology is advancing.

"We won't have time to respond to it before it's too late."
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 16/09/2026
Some good nuggets on what he's found work well at the bottom
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 16/09/2026
Very good read, "Why Software Factories Fail"
github.com
advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents/wsff.md at main · humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents
Contribute to humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-for-coding-agents development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Richard W. Bown is 📝 editing @bownie.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I rant, therefore I am. richardwbown.com/when-softwar...
richardwbown.com
When Software Engineering Lost It's Way
Software engineering has never been cool, but the current level of executive excitement in software development process is scary
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 12/09/2026
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-...
techradar.com
Meta is begging some employees to step up and become managers again
Meta wants more managers for its AI work
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Sam Littlefair @littlefair.ca · 12/09/2026
“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.”
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 12/09/2026
Seems orgs happy to let agents go wild in chase of promised productivity gains and less bothered by risk to reliability, safety and security. Like you say its all fine until its not - a bit like driving without seatbelts - is very unlikely you'll need it until that one in a thousand+ event
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 12/09/2026
Yikes! Thanks for sharing
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 12/09/2026
Half my feed is AI doom takes, when the risk most of us actually face in the near future is not a rogue superintelligence.
Anakin and Padmé meme, four panels. Anakin: "AI is the biggest existential risk facing humanity." Padmé, smiling: "Which is why your coding agent is containerised, right?" Anakin stares back, smiling, saying nothing. Padmé, now worried: "It's containerised, right?"
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 11/09/2026
Hard relate
opusfived.dev
Opusfived
Make one button blue. Change nothing else. A short interactive comedy about agentic AI assistants that can never just do the thing.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
Encona is the only actually reasonably hot sauce I can find in super markets
Bottle of Encona hot saude
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
Not sure Adam is saying lots of slower ones, neither am I
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
We're all still working it out. However Adam Thornhill (author of code as a crime scene, founder of CodeScene which is an excellent tool, long time XP/TDD practitioner) is the kind of person I will pay attention to.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
...most of your tests are very fast low level ones, and with e2e tests spending a lot of effort making sure they are as decoupled as poss, fast, reliable etc
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
wrong way to go to have lots of tests? I've worked on plenty of v high test coverage systems. Re execution speed, the testing pyramid/trophy is still valid...
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
And Adam's approach is still very much "test-first" - driving each change from a failing test at the boundary and letting the implementation follow is much the same shape as ATDD/BDD/outside-in. What's gone is the inner loop, where the unit tests were the design tool as well as the verification.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
It does NOT mean not having automated tests, you need zillions of all types of tests (e2e, integration, unit etc), all over the place
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
In part, it is near impossible to get AI/agents to do actual TDD, particularly writing the tests first.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 10/09/2026
Interesting article, I've seen a few articles recently from experienced XP background type folks saying they're dropping lower level TDD in favour of more outside in acceptance/E2E test driven approach
adamtornhill.substack.com
Practices I Abandoned with Agents: An Ode to Test-Driven Development
After 25 years with TDD, we are now parting ways. The incremental TDD steps were great for human cognition, but didn't survive the transition to agentic coding.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 07/09/2026
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.
cacm.acm.org
The Myth of the Coder – Communications of the ACM
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 05/09/2026
Done!
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Martin Fowler @martinfowler.com · 02/09/2026
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...
martinfowler.com
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
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 25/08/2026
linear.app
How teams build – Linear
AI usage patterns in software teams: who is adopting AI, how it reshapes where teams spend their time, and how much more they ship.
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 24/08/2026
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
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 24/08/2026
yegge.ai
Fences, not Sandboxes — Steve Yegge
Fences, not Sandboxes
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 22/08/2026
Gravity was ace, only 3D film I've watched I felt worked
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 22/08/2026
F1 i guess was not so obvious but I wouldnt say I thought a great movie
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Rob Bowley @robbowley.net · 22/08/2026
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.
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