UX is entering a new era. At the centre of every design conversation in 2026 lies a singular force: Artificial Intelligence. It is now so pervasive that even five-year-olds can explain its utility, while the AI natives of the new Beta generation are coming of age in a world where a conversational digital collaborator is not a feature but a baseline reality.
Martin Fowler is one of the most influential people within software architecture, and the broader tech industry. He is the Chief Scientist at Thoughtworks and the author of Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, and several other books. He has spent decades shaping how engineers think about design, architecture, and process, and regularly publishes on his blog, MartinFowler.com. In this episode, we discuss how AI is changing software development: the shift from deterministic to non-deterministic coding;
As explained in this video, flow-matching-based generative methods are a class of models that learn a "continuous vector field" in order to manage and transform what are relatively simple "noise distributions" into more complex data distributions. They do this by following ordinary differential equations. Instead of learning "discrete denoising steps" (that's what diffusion models do), they train the flow to match probability paths directly between data and noise.
What's become exceedingly important is the ability to attract and retain the best cognitive experts... to take these large models and make them very customized towards solving enterprise AI problems.