I am a big fan of Simon Willison even though I am not a coder, and I read his blog religiously. It’s one of the easiest ways for non-coders to keep track of the pace of progress happening in AI. I’ve yet to listen to this interview, but this summary by Lenny Rachitsky was interesting. 2. Mid-career engineers are the…
Read the note →Andrej Karpathy on coding with AI assistants: Given the latest lift in LLM coding capability, like many others I rapidly went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. i.e. I really am mostly programming in English now, a bit sheepishly…
Read the note →A great guide on how how to write good specs for AI coding agents. It’s aimed at professional coders but even idiots like me can steal a lot of things from this guide.
Leila Clark on the hype around AI coding:
Since Claude can’t create the good abstractions. Claude’s powers are limited by how good the blocks you give it are. Have no illusions; Claude cannot reproduce Sentry and Terraform and Playwright. These are incredibly complex and well-designed pieces of code. And since Claude can’t create good abstractions on its own, there’s a limit to how much anyone can do with Claude alone. Even though everyone on X thinks you can vibe-code all software, I think the opposite is true: the value of good abstractions and well-designed infrastructure has never been higher.
If I had to boil down my criticism of Claude to one sentence, it’s this: Claude doesn’t have a soul. It doesn’t want anything. It certainly doesn’t yearn to create beautiful things. So it doesn’t produce good solutions. It doesn’t write elegant abstractions where there were none; it doesn’t manicure the code garden.
Tailwind laid off 75% of their team because of AI: I totally see the value in the feature and I would like to find a way to add it. But the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to…
Read the note →What will software look like in a world where it can be mass produced at industrial scale with the click of a few buttons? A good perspective by Chris Loy: Our appetite for AI slop is likely to be similarly insatiable. The adoption curve we’ve seen so far may pale beside what happens when disposable software production…
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