201–210 of 329 posts
The workflow and responsibilities are very different. It can be a painful transition.
There has always been a strong undercurrent of developers feeling superior to managers and PMs and now those develoeprs are being forced to confront the reality of a manager or PM's experience.
Work is changing, and the change is only going to accelerate.
This is not a technology problem. AI intensifies work because management turns every efficiency gain into higher output quotas. The solution is labor organization, not better software.
This problem of efficiency gains never translating to more free time is a problem deep in our economic system. If we want a fix, we need to change the whole system.
I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI. You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean the…
The former is always preferred in the context of product development but poses a key person risk. Apple in its current form is a representation of this - Steve did enough work to keep the company going for a decade after his death. Now its sort-of lost on where to go next. But on the flip side look at its market cap today vs 2000.
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Simon is a new form of troll and you hit the nail on the head of what: soapboxing the obvious all in the name of AI. Just like the OpenClaw article that hit the FP yesterday, these types of folks are either doing this for marketing or they're really elated by the mediocre. Has Simon actually produced anything novel or compelling? His blog posts surely aren't - so if that's any indication of his work output I wouldn't…
> Has Simon actually produced anything novel or compelling? Here are some of my recent posts which I self-evaluate as "novel and compelling". - Running Pydantic’s Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/6/pydantic-monty/ - demonstrating how easy and useful it is to be able to turn Rust code into WASM that can run independently or be used inside a Python wheel for Pyodide i…
My is answer right now is: you can't answer that question yet and the fact that you are looking for immediate validation showcases you're just building random things. Which is great if that's what you want to do. But is it truly novel or compelling? Given you just move on to the next thing, there seems to be a lack of direction and in that regard I would say: no.
Just because you're doing more doesn't mean anything unless it's truly useful for you or others. I just don't think that's the case here. It's a new of form of move fast and break things. And while that can have net positives, we also are very aware it has many net negatives.
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I'm sorry but if you're losing your job to this shit you were too dumb to make it in the first place. Edit: Not to mention, this is what you get for not unionizing earlier. Get good or get cut.
That’s a simplistic take. Displacement isn't about being "dumb", it's about unit economics. A company will replace a brilliant person with a good enough AI if it costs 10% of the salary. The "smart" people who are keeping their jobs are exactly the ones Simon is talking about. They’re being "forced" to work more to prove their value against a machine that never sleeps. That’s the intensification.
I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI. You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean the…
I’m finding that the code LLMs produce is just average. Not great, not terrible. Which makes sense, the model is basically a complex representation of the average of its training data right? If I want what I consider ‘good code’ I have to steer it. So I wouldn’t use LLMs to produce significant chunks of code for something I care about. And publishing vibe coded projects under my own GitHub user feels like it devalues…
I think it goes without saying that they will be writing "good code" in short time.
I also wonder how much of this "I don't trust them yet" viewpoint is coming from people who are using agents the least.
Is it rare that AI one-shots code that I would be willing to raise as a PR with my name on it? Yes, extremely so (almost never).
Can I write a more-specified prompt that improves the AI's output? Also yes. And the amount of time/effort I spend iterating on a prompt, to shape the feature I want, is decreasing as I learn to use the tools better.
I think the term prompt-engineering became loaded to mean "folks who can write very good one-shot prompts". But that's a silly way of thinking about it imo. Any feature with moderate complexity involves discovery. "Prompt iteration" is more descriptive/accurate imo.
I am becoming more and more convinced that AI cant be used to make something better than what could have built before AI. You never needed 1000s of engineers to build software anyway, Winamp & VLC were build by less than four people. You only needed 1000s of people because the executive vision is always to add more useless junk into each product. And now with AI that might be even harder to avoid. This would mean the…
What is the point of even mentioning this? We live in reality. In reality, there are countless companies with thousands of engineers making each piece of software. Outside of reality, yes you can talk about a million hypothetical situations. Cherry picking rare examples like Winamp does nothing but provide an example of an exception, which yes, also exists in the real world.
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This argument has been used against every new technology since forever. And the initial gut reaction is to resist by organizing labor. Companies that succumb to organized labor get locked into that speed of operating. New companies get created that adopt 'the new thing' and blow old companies away. Repeat.
> And the initial gut reaction is to resist by organizing labor. Yeah like tech workers have similar rights to union workers. We literally have 0 power compared to any previous group of workers. Organizing of labour cant even happen in tech as tech has large percentage of immigrant labour who have even less rights than citizens. Also there is no shared pain like union workers had, we all have been given different inc…
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I'm primarily into mobiles apps these days but using the LLMs I'm able to write software in languages that I don't know with tech that I don't understand well(like bluetooth). What did you try to do and the LLM failed you?
The guy is a troll. LLM coding posts are flame bait now.
I would learn more about air combat by listening to a 12 minutes conversation with a jet fighter pilot, than I will from 3-day seminar by air force journalists. Tell me about what’s the LLM impact on your work, on account your work is not wiring about AI. Or if one wish for a more explicit noise filter: Don’t tell me what AI can do. Show me what you shipped with it that isn’t about AI.