"Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer." Simon Willison (@simonw) is one of the most prolific independent software engineers and most trusted voices on how AI is changing the craft of building software. He co-created Django, coined the term "prompt injection," and popularized the terms "agentic engineering" and "AI slop." In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 🔸 Why November 2025 was an inflection point 🔸 The "dark factory" pattern 🔸 Why mid-career engineers (not juniors) are the most at risk right now 🔸 Three agentic engineering patterns he uses daily: red/green TDD, thin templates, hoarding 🔸 Why he writes 95% of his code from his phone while walking the dog 🔸 Why he thinks we're headed for an AI Challenger disaster 🔸 How a pelican riding a bicycle became the unofficial benchmark for AI model quality Listen now 👇 youtu.be/wc8FBhQtdsA

🇨🇳 When people previously said robots would replace me, I laughed… but now they've finally developed a robot that can literally replace me. I'm done.

I find the failure cases fascinating too. > You control a hand trying to fill up a glass of water from a pouring tap

Claude can code- but can claude grow?! 🪴 So far the answer is YES. Claude is successfully keeping a living organism ALIVE. There were some hiccups this week! Some errors and resets, but Claude managed to power through and take care of Sol 🍅 A week in review:

Yup

We need more senior researchers camping out at their posters like this. Managed to catch 10 minutes of Alyosha turning @anand_bhattad’s poster into a pop-up mini lecture. Extra spark after he spotted @jathushan. Other folks in the audience: @HaoLi81 @konpatp @GurushaJuneja.