Simon Willison

Quoting Zach Kehs

Read the original on Simon Willison →

The article discusses the idea that, unlike physical structures that can only grow until they collapse, software can continue to accumulate complexity indefinitely. It highlights that code can always degrade, with new layers of indirection or performance reductions emerging over time. The piece underscores the ongoing risk of technical debt in software development.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at Simon Willison.

Simon Willison
Sep 14

Quoting Laurie Voss

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.

Simon Willison
Sep 11

Quoting Boris Cherny

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.

Simon Willison
2d ago

Quoting voxium

Simon Willison describes his experience at a large company where all documentation, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, and reports are generated by Claude Code. His team is forced to ship rapidly, working long hours, yet management insists that code push is not a bottleneck, leading to frustration and a lack of meaningful reading or review. The situation highlights a reliance on AI-generated content that may undermine quality and collaboration.

Simon Willison
Aug 19

Quoting Jeremy Morrell

My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web . LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries.

Simon Willison
13h ago

Quoting @therealcornpop

The post critiques the use of AI-generated scripts for TikTok and YouTube, arguing that such content lacks a distinct voice and genuine opinions. It highlights common AI patterns—such as generic statements, the rule of three, and staccato punctuation—that make the writing feel shallow and unoriginal. The author emphasizes that these traits reveal the absence of authentic personal perspective in the content.