It used to be that the discipline was enforced on you by the amount of time it took.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Simon Willison
BlogConceptual integrity and counting lines of codeAug 19, 2026
I can churn out code a hundred times faster. I don’t have the cognitive capacity to stay on top of 100 times the amount of code. So you still need a team of engineers, so you can load balance that cognitive capacity across the team.BlogConceptual integrity and counting lines of codeAug 19, 2026
I can do way more work as a single engineer than I could without agents.BlogConceptual integrity and counting lines of codeAug 19, 2026
That’s exactly the problem with coding agents and software: it’s very easy to keep adding new rooms, because the cost of adding those rooms is so much cheaper.Blog2025: The year in LLMsDec 31, 2025
A prompt injection attack against a browsing agent that can exfiltrate or modify that data is a terrifying prospect.Blog2025: The year in LLMsDec 31, 2025
But if you define agents as LLM systems that can perform useful work via tool calls over multiple steps then agents are here and they are proving to be extraordinarily useful.Blog2025: The year in LLMsDec 31, 2025
Claude Code and friends have conclusively demonstrated that developers will embrace LLMs on the command line, given powerful enough models and the right harness.Blog2025: The year in LLMsDec 31, 2025
I think that’s a waste of a great term, especially since it’s becoming clear likely that most programming will involve some level of AI-assistance in the near future.Blog2025: The year in LLMsDec 31, 2025
The most impactful event of 2025 happened in February, with the quiet release of Claude Code.Blog2025: The year in LLMsDec 31, 2025
The reason I think MCP may be a one-year wonder is the stratospheric growth of coding agents.Blog2025: The year in LLMsDec 31, 2025
This turns out to be the big unlock: the latest coding agents against the ~November 2025 frontier models are remarkably effective if you can give them an existing test suite to work against.
On the same topics
BlogThinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsSep 24, 2026
AI has removed the typing from software engineering & left the system design.BlogThinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsSep 24, 2026
The craft of fitting code together by hand is over; what remains is designing the loop that decides whether the output is right.BlogThinking in Systems, Shipping in LoopsSep 24, 2026
This is the new software engineering: designing the systems that let AI write code correctly at scale.BlogFrontier OverhangsSep 21, 2026
What this means is that model performance isn’t the only thing that matters: the integration between model and harness is where true agent differentiation is found.BlogInside OpenAI’s agentic software factorySep 15, 2026
Engineering specializations are disappearing, judgment and agency are more important, and it only takes one or two engineers for previously “impossible” rewrites and migrations to succeed.BlogInside OpenAI’s agentic software factorySep 15, 2026
Within a year, Codex has gone from a “nice-to-have” tool to being the backbone of pretty much everything at the company.
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