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Stop Passing Everything: What Large Parameter Lists Are Trying to Tell You
Large parameter lists are a symptom, not the disease. Here we refactor data and behavior into explicit domain concepts that are easier to understand…
Jul 23
•
Adam Tornhill
June 2026
Why Human-Level AI Won't Be Enough
What if today's best engineers aren't enough for tomorrow's systems? By following today's trends, we may discover that human-level code quality was…
Jun 30
•
Adam Tornhill
12
3
5
An opinionated (and mainly correct) guide to naming
Naming in software goes way beyond any aesthetics. Good naming minimizes reconstruction work. Here is the style and habits that I've picked up.
Jun 23
•
Adam Tornhill
15
3
Hidden Design Decisions: Refactoring Control Coupling
Boolean flags often compress important design decisions into hidden behavior, leading to the classic problem of control coupling.
Jun 16
•
Adam Tornhill
8
3
CLEAR: Software Design Principles for the Agentic Age
Traditional design principles optimize for human maintainability. CLEAR optimizes for safe evolution through explicit structure under AI-assisted…
Jun 9
•
Adam Tornhill
7
1
Why Merge Conflicts became the new Agentic Bottleneck
Revisiting some techniques from Your Code as a Crime Scene in the light of agentic coding. Specifically, how a socio-technical fit becomes even more…
Jun 2
•
Adam Tornhill
7
2
May 2026
A Blast from the Past: SDD and the Illusion of Known Scope
Implementation was never just typing. It's discovery and learning. Tooling changed, human problem solving didn’t.
May 28
•
Adam Tornhill
10
2
Make the Domain Explicit: From Procedural Mess to Local Reasoning
The more code hides, the more humans and agents have to reconstruct before making a safe change. In this article, we break apart a complex procedural…
May 21
•
Adam Tornhill
5
1
How Much of my Writing is AI-Generated?
Writing is learning. LLMs remove that component.
May 19
•
Adam Tornhill
4
1
Reveal Intent in Complex Conditions
Extraction in itself is useless. Naming makes the difference. Here we refactor complex conditions to improve agentic coding.
May 14
•
Adam Tornhill
1
Compressed Cognition: The Cost of Faster Coding
Agentic coding collapses the timeline of software decisions. What we gain in speed, we pay for in decision density and mental energy. Here's a deep dive…
May 7
•
Adam Tornhill
27
7
Kill the Conditional Maze: From If-Statements to Rule Pipelines
Why long conditionals break both humans and agents, and how to refactor tangled if-chains into clear, composable rules that scale with change.
May 5
•
Adam Tornhill
7
2
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