Code for Humans and Machines | Adam Tornhill | Substack

Designing AI-aware software in practice through practical refactoring patterns and principles. Click to read Code for Humans and Machines, by Adam Tornhill, a Substack publication.

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Code for Humans and Machines | Adam Tornhill | Substack · Oct 06, 2026

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Evolutionary Refactoring: Let Agents Invent Codebase-Specific Patterns

A promising strategy for large-scale refactoring where coding agents iteratively learn how to improve your code as they go.

JOEL SPOLSKYDANIEL WEBB

Code for Humans and Machines | Adam Tornhill | Substack · Sep 24, 2026

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND TRADE

Follow the Law of Demeter: Reduce the Dependency Surface

Poor encapsulation creates excessive coupling, turning what should be a local change into shotgun surgery. In this article we look at dependencies as that multi-dimensional problem.

Code for Humans and Machines | Adam Tornhill | Substack · Sep 10, 2026

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING AND PROGRAMMING

Practices I Abandoned with Agents: An Ode to Test-Driven Development

After 25 years with TDD, we are now parting ways. The incremental TDD steps were great for human cognition, but didn't survive the transition to agentic coding.

Code for Humans and Machines | Adam Tornhill | Substack · Sep 08, 2026

FLEET OPERATIONS AND ROUTING

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, evolve, and verify.

Code for Humans and Machines | Adam Tornhill | Substack · Sep 02, 2026

PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES AND COMPILERS

Beyond Lambdas: Raising the Abstraction Level of Functional Code

Good software design raises the abstraction level until the code communicates the domain rather than the mechanics.