Martin Fowler's May 27 Fragments brings together four arguments with direct implications for teams working with AI agents. All four are worth covering.
Ian Johnson: build quality gates before releasing the agent
Ian Johnson published a series about restructuring a gnarly codebase: three months, 258 commits, moving from a Laravel monolith with no tests to an application with automated quality gates and an AI agent shipping production code with minimal supervision.
The insight Fowler highlights is about the transition from in-the-loop to on-the-loop:
"For the first two months of this project, I used Claude Code with auto-approve turned off. Every file edit, every terminal command, every change… I reviewed it before it executed. The results were good. The code was clean. But I was doing most of the thinking and half the typing. The agent was a fancy autocomplete with better suggestions."
