Key themes in Technology Radar Vol.34
Thoughtworks Technology Podcast
Thoughtworks
4.5 • 58 Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
In April 2026 we published a new edition of the Thoughtworks Technology Radar — volume 34. Like many recent volumes, this one was dominated by AI. However, while editions over the last couple of years have illustrated the dizzying proliferation of AI-related technologies, vol.34 indicates a degree of evolution in the field, demonstrated by a focus on consistency, reliability and mitigating the collaborative and individual challenges of working with AI. This is reflected in the four themes identified for this Radar: the challenge of evaluating technology in an agentic world; retaining principles, relinquishing patterns; securing permission-hungry agents; putting coding agents on a leash.
On this special Technology Radar episode of the Technology Podcast, host Ken Mugrage is joined by Alessio Ferri and Jim Gumbley to discuss the key themes in Technology Radar Vol.34. Diving into topics ranging from cognitive debt, harness engineering and the lethal trifecta, listen to gain a deeper understanding not just of the latest Radar but, more importantly, what AI-assisted and agentic software engineering really look like today.
Read the latest Thoughtworks Technology Radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everybody, and welcome to another edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology Podcast. |
| 0:12.6 | My name is Ken McGrage. |
| 0:13.8 | I am one of your regular hosts. |
| 0:16.3 | And I have a couple of guests with me today. |
| 0:17.9 | We're going to be talking about the themes for the upcoming, or actually by the time this publishes, the just out edition of the ThoughtWorks technology radar. So I'll let them introduce themselves. Then I'll go into a little bit about what the radar and the themes are. So Alessio, if you want to go first, just a quick intro. Sure. Hi, Ken. Hello, everyone. I'm Alessio Ferri. I'm a software developer here at ThoughtWorks. I specialize in enterprise platform modernization. |
| 0:41.3 | Hey, Ken. It's Jim Gumbly. I'm business information security officer at ThoughtWorks, which sounds very complacency, but I've got a technical background, security architect and Java developer in sort of previous lives. |
| 0:57.0 | And yeah, it was my first, it was my first radar in Bangalore recently. |
| 1:03.5 | So, yeah, thanks for having me on the podcast. |
| 1:06.1 | Great. |
| 1:06.3 | It's great to have you both. |
| 1:07.9 | For anyone that's not familiar, twice a year, ThoughtWorks publishes a thing called |
| 1:12.7 | our technology radar. And what that is, is a list of technologies and there's techniques and tools |
| 1:19.7 | and platforms and languages, if I remember right, that we use or are looking at or have tried or what have |
| 1:26.8 | you. It started many years ago. |
| 1:29.8 | We're actually at edition number 34 as a way to communicate internally. |
| 1:35.8 | So if Thoughtworks is a fairly large global company and we'd have an engineer in Australia that was looking at doing a new thing was probably a |
| 1:46.7 | JavaScript framework at that time and they wanted to know which ones were in use |
| 1:50.8 | in other places and oh okay this one in in London they've they're they're using |
| 1:55.7 | that in a regular basis and so it came as a communication method for us to share |
| 2:03.1 | what the things are that we're using. |
| 2:09.9 | And so the way it basically works is that we have a group of people that we call Doppler and Alessio and Jim are both on that that curates these, what we call a technology blip. |
| 2:20.5 | And so there's a couple words there that are important. |
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