The article reflects on the shift in perspective after the release of Fable, a new model that promised to solve many coding challenges at a comparable or lower cost. Prior to Fable, developers felt it was pointless to invest heavily in coding tools or context strategies, as newer models would likely render them obsolete. However, Fable’s performance was so impressive that, despite its high cost, it prompted a reevaluation of how work was distributed across different models such as Opus, 5.6, K3, and GLM.
The article discusses how production code generated by Claude, Anthropic’s AI, should meet higher standards than human-written code. Anthropic enforces this through numerous guardrails such as lint rules, extensive testing, Claude-driven end‑to‑end tests, daily fuzzers, automated code and security reviews, and automated refactoring. These measures aim to prevent the code from becoming difficult to maintain.
Laurie Voss argues that while the cost of writing code has fallen dramatically, the costs of reviewing, fixing, and operating software are rising and will continue to do so. She emphasizes that the true expense lies in understanding user needs, precisely defining requirements, and ensuring a pleasant user experience—costs that are unique to each software product and do not scale with reuse. As software demand grows without an upper limit, these user‑centric costs will dominate the overall development effort.
Jake Boggan, a former graph theory enthusiast who spent 24 years working on Barnette's Conjecture, expresses a mix of disappointment and sadness upon learning that the problem has been solved. He recounts his time studying in Budapest, his extensive work on the conjecture, and his brief moment of feeling he had solved it last summer. Boggan’s comment reflects the emotional impact of seeing a long‑standing personal challenge resolved by others.
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it.
Simon Willison reflects on how programming used to be a rewarding career, describing it as a job where developers solved complex logic puzzles for high pay and had full control over strategy and timelines. He notes that coding agents and large language models (LLMs) now handle many of these puzzles, offering a "gift that keeps on giving" for those who enjoy building systems without caring deeply about the underlying problems. However, for programmers who found joy in directly solving problems, this shift represents a significant loss.
The article discusses a shift in code review practices, moving from a final gate to continuous review that functions like spellcheck during coding. It highlights how the Claude Code team uses the Claude AI to catch routine mistakes before human reviewers intervene, allowing developers to focus on higher-level issues. The piece references insights from Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang on this evolving approach.
The article announces that Claude Code will now support AGENTS.md files starting with version 2.1.277. If a CLAUDE.md file is absent in a folder, Claude will automatically look for and use AGENTS.md, leveraging Claude Code mods to customize the harness. The built‑in mod is available for use, and users can also create their own custom project instructions.
Qwen 3. 8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.
SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and in...
Simon Willison presented a closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, where he showcased a pixel‑art animation of kakapo parrots celebrating a record‑breaking breeding season in 2026. He used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate the animation from Google‑searched kakapo photos, then employed Claude Code with Playwright to record a 15‑second video of the animated HTML5 canvas, which he embedded in his Keynote slide.
Simon Willison has released the September edition of his sponsors‑only monthly newsletter. The issue covers new Fable class models, a pricing war, 3D graphics with Blender and pixel art, LLMs applied to mathematics, accidental cyberattacks, the vulnapocalypse affecting Datasette, his current tools, and software releases for 2026. Sponsors can access the full newsletter for $10/month, with an August preview available for free.
The article discusses how computer programming fundamentally involves problem‑solving with computers and managing complexity. It argues that these skills will remain valuable and sustain a viable career even as AI tools become more prevalent.