Extreme Humanism
The stance that as coding is increasingly automated by AI, deliberately amplifying the distinctly human dimensions of software work — craft, judgment, relationships, individuals and interactions — becomes a cultural and competitive imperative.
Also known as: conspicuously human
Part of: Agency
Documents (2)
- Presentation: The Future of Engineering: Mindsets That Matter When Code Isn't Enough Ben Greene · 2026-07-28 Reader 🖥️
Software engineers remain valuable in the age of coding agents not because they can still write code, but because building working systems still requires disciplined simplicity, deliberately protected comprehension, willingness to attack hard problems first, and human empathy for customers — capacities coding agents lack and that startups have always demanded of engineers under resource pressure. - Jimmy Nilsson's Post — reflections after the Thoughtworks 'Future of Software Development' retreat Jimmy Nilsson · 2026-07-07 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
Reflecting on Thoughtworks' 'Future of Software Development' retreat, the author reports that leading practitioners have moved past the hype-versus-doom polarisation about agentic coding toward nuanced 'when, where and how' thinking, converging on the view that enduring engineering fundamentals (DDD, XP, TOC, TDD, BDD, CD) plus a renewed 'Extreme Humanism' matter more than ever in the agentic age — which is why he is optimistic.
Propositions touching this concept (1)
By publication month, oldest first (extraction month when no publication date is known).
2026-07
- explicitA recognised ingredient of a healthy agentic-age future is 'Extreme Humanism' — being 'conspicuously human'.
Tensions
Will the classic fundamentals (especially DDD / domain modelling) actually deliver this time — is the revival evidenced or merely asserted?
from: What did the participants of the Thoughtworks 'Future of Software Engineering' Europe retreat (mid-2026) conclude about how agentic AI is reshaping software engineering?
- Notes from FOSE Europe (Giles Edwards-Alexander): Skeptical: domain modelling kept being proposed, but it is not a new idea and never became the standard before — why would it suddenly work now?
- Software Design in the Agentic Age: Place Your Bets (Mathias Verraes): Evidenced: feeding an agent an explicit domain model first yields better code structure and database performance, and bounded contexts also reduce token cost.
- Jimmy Nilsson's Post — reflections after the Thoughtworks 'Future of Software Development' retreat (Jimmy Nilsson): Asserted: DDD, XP, TOC, TDD, BDD, CD are 'more important than ever' in the agentic age.
Assessment: The single slogan 'fundamentals matter more' spans concrete evidence (Verraes), unargued assertion with admitted bias (Nilsson), and active skepticism (Edwards-Alexander) — from attendees of one retreat. This directly exposes the 'the fundamentals are agreed' assumption below: the cohort's flagship convergence is doing a lot of work with very uneven support underneath it.
Where does the non-delegable human asset now live — the harness/platform, the oracle, the fundamentals, or the developer's understanding?
from: What is the future of software development in the agentic/AI age?
- Notes from FOSE Europe (Giles Edwards-Alexander): In the harness — the continuously-evolving scaffolding of architecture guidance and rigour around the agents — though it must stay team-distributed, not centralized.
- What Survived Contact (Sam Ruby): In the oracle — the objective's evaluation is the single thing the person directing the model cannot delegate back to it.
- Jimmy Nilsson's Post — reflections after the Thoughtworks 'Future of Software Development' retreat (Jimmy Nilsson): In the fundamentals plus a renewed 'Extreme Humanism' — the durable disciplines and the conspicuously human element.
- AI Is Changing Software Engineering. The Fundamentals Still Matter. (Abby Bangser): In right-sized boundaries and the operational loop — humans must stay in operations because their learning is the irreplaceable asset.
- Fragments: February 9 (Martin Fowler (Feb 9)): In the developer's model-building and shared understanding — the craft of devising abstractions to reason about the domain.
Assessment: This is the deepest structural disagreement — every author agrees a human residue remains but nominates a different residue, and the choice determines what to invest in and what to teach. The harness-centric (Edwards-Alexander), oracle-centric (Ruby), fundamentals-centric (Nilsson/Bangser), and understanding-centric (Fowler) camps are not merely emphases: they imply different career ladders, different hiring, and different failure modes. Ruby's oracle and Bangser's operational-learning are the most operationally concrete; Nilsson's is the least argued. The absence in the corpus of anyone who holds 'nothing is non-delegable' is itself telling (see unexamined assumptions).
Does the current evidence favor optimism or doubt about agentic engineering's payoff?
from: What is the future of software development in the agentic/AI age?
- Jimmy Nilsson's Post — reflections after the Thoughtworks 'Future of Software Development' retreat (Jimmy Nilsson): Optimistic: the mature, nuanced, human-centred discourse among leading practitioners is a good predictor of a healthy trajectory.
- The Future Of Software Engineering (Thoughtworks): Pessimist-realist: there is an active regression underway that most optimism ignores.
- What Survived Contact (Sam Ruby): Doubt is currently better-evidenced than hope, and that asymmetry is the uncomfortable thing to watch.
Assessment: The sharpest divergence in the corpus, because it is about the epistemic ground of every other claim. Nilsson's optimism is explicitly consensus-of-the-in-group and self-flagged as biased; Ruby and the Thoughtworks report both bring the only genuinely external evidence (DORA reversal, HBR intensification, outside surveys) — and it points the other way. On the current record, the skeptics have the stronger footing precisely because the optimistic case is methodologically weakest (a 'sample of one,' as Ruby says of his own best data). The whole cohort's cautious optimism may be an artifact of who was in the room.
Does AI adoption improve output and developer experience together, or do they decouple — with more output bought at the cost of the developers?
from: What is the future of software development in the agentic/AI age?
- Jimmy Nilsson's Post — reflections after the Thoughtworks 'Future of Software Development' retreat (Jimmy Nilsson): Harmony: adoption is energizing and the human element flourishes ('Extreme Humanism'); reasons for optimism.
- Why did Martin Fowler invite 60 engineers to a ski resort? (Ivett Ördög): Liberation: adoption frees engineers from CRUD toil to focus on hard problems — 'exciting times.'
- The Future Of Software Engineering (Thoughtworks): Decoupling: organizations can gain output while developers report lower satisfaction — productivity and experience are coming apart.
- Finding Comfort in the Uncertainty (Annie Vella): Hidden cost: the engineers going hardest on AI are being exhausted by it, and the warning signs are easy to miss.
- Fragments: February 13 (Martin Fowler (Feb 13)): Intensification risk: teams stay the same size and 'do much more,' but doing much more is exactly what drives burnout.
Assessment: This is the specific, evidence-bearing form of the optimism/pessimism split, and it cuts directly against any simple reading of 'DevEx = AgentEx' as good news. The harmony camp (Nilsson, Ördög) speaks from felt experience and in-group mood; the decoupling camp (Thoughtworks, Vella) and Fowler's own cited HBR study bring the harder data, and it shows output and wellbeing pulling apart. Notably Fowler holds both 'same-size teams do much more' and the burnout finding without resolving them — the single clearest internal contradiction in the corpus, and a sign the harmony framing is doing more reassuring than the evidence supports.
Is preserving human understanding of the system a first-order value, or is comprehension safely offloadable so long as output is verifiable?
from: What is the future of software development in the agentic/AI age?
- Fragments: February 4 (Martin Fowler (Feb 4)): Preserve understanding: it is a first-order value, and practices that force explanation defend it.
- Fragments: February 9 (Martin Fowler (Feb 9)): Preserve understanding and craft: cognitive debt and the loss of model-building are the real costs to guard against.
- Jimmy Nilsson's Post — reflections after the Thoughtworks 'Future of Software Development' retreat (Jimmy Nilsson): Preserve the human: 'Extreme Humanism' and being conspicuously human are load-bearing anchors.
- We've Stopped Arguing About Whether AI Changes Software (Greg Herlein): Offloadable: the quality bar is 'is it verifiable enough,' not whether a human read or understood the code.
- Looking back at the Future of Software Engineering unconference (Bartosz Ocytko): Offloadable for most builders: citizen developers need never read the code if a constrained platform makes failure modes disappear.
Assessment: The optimist-practitioner vs. skeptic-humanist axis. Fowler and Nilsson treat comprehension and craft as intrinsic goods whose loss is a harm even when output is fine; Herlein and Ocytko treat comprehension as instrumental — replaceable by verification and platform guardrails. The humanist camp has the stronger long-run argument (Fowler's cognitive-debt case and Ocytko's own 'who-guards-the-guards' problem both show verification and guardrails are themselves fallible artifacts that someone must understand), but the offloadable camp is describing what is actually happening at scale. The crux is whether verifiability can ever be robust enough to make understanding optional — which Ruby's own Goodhart gap (a passable oracle diverging from true intent) suggests it cannot fully be.
Open gaps (1)
- incompleteGreene's evidence throughout is drawn almost entirely from his own two startups (InsightSquared, Outcomes4Me) plus one recent personal side project (the Android RAG proof-of-concept); no comparative case is offered of a startup or team that ignored these mindsets and what happened as a result, nor of a larger, less resource-constrained organization successfully applying the same lessons. It is left open whether 'the lessons startups have always taught us' generalize past small, high-autonomy, high-trust teams.Presentation: The Future of Engineering: Mindsets That Matter When Code Isn't Enough — read next: Seek accounts of these same mindsets (start simple, protect comprehension, attack hard bits first) applied — or failing to apply — inside larger, less autonomous engineering organizations.