Grady Booch

Confidence 0.75 · 1 source · last confirmed 2026-05-28

Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM (IBM Fellow). Co-author of the Gang of Four Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (1994) with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and John Vlissides — the canonical text that established design patterns as a named software-engineering discipline. Creator of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) — the standard pictorial representation of software systems used across the modern software engineering discipline.

Paul Everitt at AI Dev 26 SF cites Booch repeatedly as the conceptual lineage for the agentic engineering reframe:

• The third golden age of software engineering podcast — Booch’s interview where he argues “coding was never really the big thing for software engineering — software engineering was so much more than that.” + “coding was never the bottleneck.” Cited as the conceptual substrate for Everitt’s engineering-discipline reframe at AI scale argument.
• The go back to first principles, master systems design call — Everitt: “From the first golden age, go back to first principles. You want to be valuable? Go back to first principles and master systems design.”
• The Gang-of-Four-for-AI call — the source’s most-novel meta-contribution. Booch “knows there is a next thing called agentic patterns and he wants one of you in the audience to be the one that gets the ball rolling and helps us all figure out this discipline of agentic design patterns, agentic engineering.” The wiki’s first named-Gang-of-Four-for-AI call — plausible single-source-deferred concept-page candidate: agentic design patterns.

Appears in this wiki via

• 2026-05-22-everitt-jetbrains-deeplearningai-ai-dev-26-sf-shift-to-agentic-engineering — cited extensively as the conceptual-lineage anchor for the agentic engineering reframe; the third golden age of software engineering podcast; the Gang-of-Four-for-AI call.

Open questions

• The third golden age of software engineering podcast — which podcast / episode? Worth identifying and ingesting if substantive beyond Everitt’s compression. Likely Software Engineering Radio or similar — Everitt does not pin the venue in the talk.
• Whether anyone in the AI-Dev-26-SF audience (or elsewhere) takes up the Gang-of-Four-for-AI call — agentic design patterns as a deliberate discipline. Worth tracking for second-source promotion of the concept.
• Note: only one substantive citation in the wiki at present; the second-source promotion rule is softened here because Booch is a foundational software-engineering historical figure rather than a recent practitioner — a one-source threshold is justified when the figure’s standing in the field is independently established.