If you've hung around agile circles for long, you've probably heard about the concept of servant leadership, that managers should think of themselves as supporting the team, removing blocks, protecting them from the vagaries of corporate life. That's never sounded quite right to me, and a recent conversation with Kent Beck nailed why - it's gaslighting. The manager claims to be a servant, but everyone knows who really has the power.

I've heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. The LLM has access to the user's email account, reads all the emails, decides which emails to ignore, drafts some emails for the user to approve, and replies to some emails autonomously. It can also hook into a calendar, confirming, arranging, or denying meetings.

In Februrary 2026, Thoughtworks hosted a workshop called “The Future of Software Development” in Deer Valley Utah. While it was held in the mountains of Utah as a nod to the 25th anniversary of the writing of Manifesto for Agile Software Development, it was a forward-looking event, focusing on how the rise of AI and LLMs would affect our profession.

I'm increasingly seeing a lot of technical and business writing make heavy use of bold font weights, in an attempt to emphasize what the writers think is important. LLMs seem to have picked up and spread this practice widely. But most of this is self-defeating, the more a writer uses typographical emphasis, the less power it has, quickly reaching the point where it loses all its benefits.

A conversation between Unmesh, Rebecca, and Martin on how LLMs help us shape the abstractions in our software. We view our challenge as building systems that survive change, requiring us to manage our cognitive load. We can do this by mapping the “what” of we want our software to do into the “how” of programming languages. This “what” and “how” are built up in a feedback loop. TDD helps us operationalize that loop, and LLMs allow us to explore that loop in an informal and more fluid manner.

Many teams have turned into tribes wedded to exclusively adaptation or optimization. But this misses the point that both of these are important, and we need to manage the tension between them. We can do this by thinking of two operating modes: explore (adaptation-dominant) and exploit (optimization dominant). We tailor a team's operating model to a particular blend of the two - considering uncertainty, risk, cost of change, and an evidence threshold. We should be particularly careful at the points where there is a handoff between the two modes

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