Thoughtworks Technology Podcast

Vibe coding was, remarkably, named word of the year by the Collins English Dictionary at the start of November 2025 — pretty good going for a term that was only coined in February. We first discussed it on the Technology Podcast back in April, and, given its prominence in the collective lexicon this year, thought we should revisit and reflect on the topic as 2025 draws to a close. 

Lots has happened in the intervening months: MCP a...

One of the biggest stories in software engineering in 2025 is the impact of generative AI on the software development lifecycle. From advances in coding assistance to the emergence of so-called agentic coding, there's undoubtedly a lot for software developers to process, learn and experiment with — not to mention rapid change to contend with.

On this episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Brandon Cook to d...

In every Thoughtworks Technology Radar we feature three to five themes that represent the core issues and topics that emerged from the conversations we had when putting the publication together. This time (Fall 2025) they're all united by AI. They are: infrastructure automation arriving for AI, the rise of agents elevated by MCP, AI coding workflows and emerging AI antipatterns.

On this episode of the Technology Podcast, Bryan Oliv...

Everyone knows an AI strategy is important — but how do you build one with humans at the center? That's a question Tiankai Feng, Thoughtworks Global Director for Data and AI Strategy, has been pondering ever since the publication of his 2024 book Humanizing Data Strategy. Now, just over a year later, he's outlined his thinking in a follow-up, Humanizing AI Strategy. With the subtitle "leading AI with sense and soul," it's a practic...

Everyone seems to be talking about context engineering. That was certainly the case in our recent discussions for the upcoming edition of the Technology Radar (volume 33, due early November 2025). And although we ran into the term on the Technology Podcast just a few weeks ago, we thought it would be useful to try and tackle exactly what people are talking about when they talk about context engineering. We know context is importan...

Although the concept of the 'citizen developer' isn't new, with the rise of AI the relationship between those building software without much technical experience and seasoned software developers is becoming more significant. That's not to say there's conflict exactly, but there are often competing interests and demands — which can lead to tension, organizational friction and governance challenges. 

On this episode of the Technology...

Managing technological change in an organization — particularly a large and complex one — has always been challenging. But thanks to the rapid adoption of AI in all kinds of spheres, from knowledge management to software development to content creation, it's becoming more difficult than ever. How do you strike a balance between governance and safety and autonomy and empowerment? How should teams be structured and how should they wo...

Generative AI can be incredibly powerful when it comes to legacy modernization. Not only can it help us better understand a large, aging codebase, it can even help us reverse engineer a legacy system when we don't have access to the complete source code. Doing it, though, requires a specific approach that's being described as 'context engineering'.

This is something we've been exploring a lot in recent months at Thoughtworks. On th...

How should businesses go about actually navigating AI? It's one thing to strategize and generate new ideas, but what needs to be done to put it into practice in a way that's effective and commercially impactful?

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, new host Nigel Dalton is joined by his Thoughtworks colleague May Xu — Head of Tech for Thoughtworks APAC — and Simon Noonan, CTO at Australian business software company MYOB.

Thou...

In an age of vibe coding and LLMs, do we really need to care about documentation? Do we need to spend time and energy producing it — time when we could just be shipping code? Of course we do; particularly if we want to communicate and share software with other humans. 

To discuss documentation in 2025, Technology Podcast host Lilly Ryan is joined by Heidi Waterhouse, a very special guest with an esteemed and varied career in techni...

The technology industry has embraced specialisms — not just in different fields or job roles, like web development or security, but even in terms of particular platforms or stacks. But are we losing something as every tech professional is forced to push themselves into increasingly smaller niches?

Martin Fowler and Unmesh Joshi think so. They've been thinking a lot about the importance of what they call "Expert Generalists" — profe...

Back in 1994, Peter Deutsch and his colleagues at Sun Microsystems identified what they described as the "eight fallacies of distributed computing" — flawed assumptions that often get made when teams move from monolithic to distributed software architectures. In recent years, software architecture experts and regular writing partners Neal Ford and Mark Richards have identified a further three new fallacies of distributed computing:...

What if your AI agents could think more like IT operations staff — and less like tools?

In this episode, we catch up with Zichuan Xiong, to explore the Model Context Protocol (MCP) — a powerful new way to give AI agents deeper awareness of the tools, information and history they need to work effectively in the operations space. Unlike traditional APIs that just t...

Google I/O 2025 took place in May. It's always a great opportunity to find out how Google is trying to shape the industry agenda, but this year the predominance of Gemini meant the event was a chance to get a better look at how Google will play its hand in the AI market in the months to come.

To dissect the headlines from this year's Google I/O and explore what we can learn about Google's strategic focus — and how the company is th...

Mainframe modernization is hard: there's a huge amount of complexity that needs to be understood before it can be effectively addressed. Generative AI, however, can be a particularly powerful tool for understanding mainframe legacy codebases, something we've been exploring with Mechanical Orchard while working together on its Imogen modernization platform.

In this episode of the Technology Podcast, hosts Ken Mugrage and Alexey Boas...

You might think you know software engineering, but what are the really fundamental elements? What are the concepts, ideas and practices that are completely essential? What makes software engineering what it is?

Thoughtworker Nate Schutta and Dan Vega are attempting to address those questions in their upcoming book with O'Reilly, The Fundamentals of Software Engineering. Covering topics ranging from reading code through to the impor...

Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol.32 was published at the start of April 2025. Featuring 105 blips, it offered a timely snapshot of what's interesting and important in the industry. Through the process of putting it together, we also identify a collection of key themes that speak to the things that shaped our conversations.

This time, there were four: supervised agents in coding assistants, evolving observability, the R in RAG and ...

The term 'vibe coding' — which first appeared in a post on X by Andrej Karpathy in early February 2025 — has set the software development world abuzz: everyone seems to have their own take on what it is, how it's done and whether it's a bold new chapter in the history of programming or an insult to anyone that's ever written a line of code.

Clearly, then, we need to talk about vibe coding — and that's precisely what we do on this e...

Nearly ten years after the first edition of Infrastructure as Code was published by O'Reilly, Kief Morris is publishing a third edition of the book. But why a new edition now? What's changed in technology and business over the last decade?

Quite a lot, as it happens. To talk about what's new — both in the infrastructure world and in the book itself — Kief Morris joins host Ken Mugrage on the Technology Podcast. They discuss each ed...