YouSaid · the spoken record

Simon Willison

lines on the record: 120
first: 2026-04-02
most recent: 2026-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“24 hours a day, they're making requests and saying, hey, I need access to Jira and all of those kinds of things at an enormous cost, like they were spending $10,000 a day on tokens, I think, simulating all of these end users. I believe so. But it meant that their software was being very robustly tested in all of these different ways. And yeah, it's kind of similar to having similar to having a manual QA team, except one that never sleeps. And I thought that was fascinating as a sort of”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But what if you can simulate that QA department? So, what StrongDM were doing is they had a swarm of agent testers who were actually simulating customing end users. So the software that they were building, this is crazy. The software is security software for access management. So when you sign it, when you started as a company and somebody needs to assign you access to JIRA and then give you access to Slack and all of that kind of thing, they were building software for that. That's very security like adjacent. That's not the kind of thing that you should be vibe coding at all based on most people's understanding of how the world works. And there are legitimate security company who've been doing this stuff without AI for years. So it's not like they didn't understand the risks. So the way they did their testing is they had this swarm of simulated employees all in a simulated Slack channel saying things like, hey, could somebody give me access to JIRA? The Slack channel itself is simulated. We'll talk about that in a moment.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of test it furiously to figure out if it's working or not. That, I think, went out of fashion a bit over the past sort of five to ten years from what I've seen in Silicon Valley because you kind of want your engineers to take responsibility.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You cannot type code into a computer. Exactly. And honestly, I thought six months ago, I thought that was crazy. And today, probably 95% of the code that I produce, I didn't type it myself. So that world is practical already because the latest models are good enough that you can tell them, oh, no, rename that variable and refactor that and add this line there. And they'll just do it. It's faster than you typing on the keyboard yourself. The next rule, though, is nobody reads the code. And this is the thing which strongDM started doing back in, I think it was August last year, they said, okay, we're not going to read the code. So what does that mean? How do you produce software that works and is good if you're not reading the code? And they've come up with a whole bunch of answers. One of the most interesting was the way they did testing where in traditional software, some companies will have a QA department, like the engineers write a bunch of software and then you throw it over the wall to the QA department and they sort of”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, exactly This is the fascinating thing, so there's a policy of nobody writes any code, and quite a few companies are beginning to introduce that now”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the machines can operate in complete darkness if you don't need people on the factory floor. What does that look like for software? And there's some very, this company called StrongDM has been pushing this and doing some really interesting experiments around this. That I think is the neck. That's futuristic. We're trying to figure out what that looks like and how we can responsibly build software in that way right now and making some quite interesting discoveries about things that work and things that don't work. But that to me is the next sort of barrier.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're still churning out the same quality of software. That's less interesting to me than if the software we're producing has less bugs, more features, it's higher quality, it's better software because we're harnessing these tools. The really interesting future is something which some people have been calling the dark factory pattern or software factories. This is the idea where right now if you're a professional using these tools, the way you do it is you tell them what to build and then you look at the code and you review that code really carefully and make sure it's doing the right thing. What does it look like if you're not reviewing the code, if you're not looking that code, but you're also not vibe coding, you're not throwing everything to the wind and seeing what happened. You're applying professional practices and quality expectations to code that you're not directly reviewing. The reason it's called the dark factory is there's this idea in factory automation that if your factory is so automated that you don't need any people there, you can turn the lights off.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that a gentic engineering is such a deep and fascinating discipline because the art of getting really good results out of this, like the art of having them help you build software you could deploy to a million people, that's never going to be easy. That's never going to be trivial. That's always going to require a great deal of depth of experience in what software works and how these agents work. And I love that. kind of writing a book about it now that I'm publishing a chapter of the time on my blog the best form of writing because I don't have an editor or any pressure from a publisher is just when I feel like writing another chapter I can I can do that but there's so much discuss but yeah so I think right now the frontier is how do we build professional software using coding agents how do we build software that is I don't just want to build software that's that's good I want us to build software that is better than we were building before like if the agents let us move a bit faster”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think those things are wonderful. The big debate, the ongoing debate has been what do we call it when a professional software engineer uses these tools to write real code that's production ready that they've reviewed and they've checked all of the details of, a lot of people call that vibe coding as well. I think that devalues vibe coding as a term because it's useful to say I vibe coded this as in I haven't even looked at how it works. It's not production ready, but it's kind of a cool prototype. The moment vibe coding means everything involved that touches AI, it effectively ends up needing programming because we're all moving in a direction where our code is mediated through AI at some point. So what do we call it for professionals? I've gone with a gentle engineering because I think the thing to emphasize is these coding agents, right? If you're asking ChatGPT to knock out some code, that's a different thing from if you're running codecs and having it write the code, debug the code, test the code, all of that.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life by knocking out these little tools. Of course, the problem is that there is a limit on how much you can do that responsibly. I like to tell people, if you're vibe coding something for yourself where the only person who gets hurt if it has bugs is you, go wild. That's completely fine. The moment you're vibe coding code for other people to use where your bugs might actually harm somebody else, that's when you need to take a step back and say, hang on a second, this is not a responsible way of using these tools. The challenge is that understanding what's responsible and what isn't is in itself a sort of expert level skill. So knowing that once you start dealing with like scraping other people's websites, maybe you'll damage their websites by hitting them too hard. There are so many ways that you can cause damage if you don't know what you're doing. But I love that liberation and I love that people can come to meetings with a prototype that they knocked up of that idea that illustrates that idea.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's talk about the two, the sort of the vibe coding side of things, and then there's the, and I like Andrei Carpy's original definition of vibe coding, which is when you don't even look at code and you basically just go on the vibes. You say, build me something that does X and it builds it, and you play with it, and if it looks good, then great. And if it doesn't quite do it, you keep on going back and forth. But it's very hands-off. You're not looking at code. He originally said, this is great for having fun and prototyping. And it then expand exploded way out of that. And I think today, Vibe coding is effectively, the definition I use is it's when you're not looking at the code. You don't care about code. And maybe you don't understand the code, like non-programmers can now tell Claude what to build and it can build them a little app. And I love that. I absolutely love that we're sort of democratizing the art of getting a computer to do stuff for you, of automating tedious things in your life.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I write so much of my code on my phone. It's wild. I can get good work done walking the dog along the beach, which is delightful, you know?”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Settle hidden bugs, but generally you can tell if the thing actually works. If it writes you an essay, if it writes you a prepares a lawsuit for you, it's so much harder to derive if it's actually done a good job to figure out if it got things right or wrong. But it's kind of happening to us. A software engineers, it came for us first and we're figuring out, okay, what do our careers look like? How do we work as teams when part of what we did that used to take most of the time doesn't take most of the time anymore? What does that look like? And it's going to be very interesting seeing how this rolls out to other information work in the future.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Started tinkering with this stuff, got this moment of realization where it's like, oh, wow, this stuff actually works now. I can tell it to build code. And if I describe that code well enough, it'll follow the instructions and it'll build the thing that I asked it to build. I think the reverberations of that are still shaking us to the software engineering. A lot of people woke up in January and February and started realizing, oh, wow, this technology which I'd been kind of paying attention to, suddenly it's got really, really good. And what does that mean? Like what is the fact, like I can churn out 10,000 lines of code in a day and most of it works. Is that good? Like, how do we get from most of it works to all of it works? There are so many new questions that we're facing, which I think makes us a bellwether for other information workers. Like code is easier than almost every other problem that you pose these agents because code is obviously right or wrong. Like it produces code, you run the code. Either it works or it doesn't work. It might be a few.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Out the root of bugs and all of that. And so the end result of this, the end result of these two labs throwing everything they had at making their models better at code is in November we had what I call the inflection point where GPT 5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 came along and they were both just they were incrementally better than the previous models, but in a way that crossed the threshold where previously if you had these coding agents, you could get them to write you some code and most of the time it would mostly work, but you had to pay very close attention to it. And suddenly we went from that to almost all of the time it does what you told it to do, which makes all of the difference in the world. Now you can spin up a coding agent and say, hey, build me a Mac application that does this thing and you'll get something back, which still needs some back and forth, but it won't just be a buggy pile of rubbish that doesn't do anything. That was fascinating because all of the software engineers who took time off over the holidays.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's talk about all of 2025 very briefly. 2025 was the year that, especially anthropic and open AI realized that code is the application. Like being able, having these things generate code, I think partly because Anthropic came up with Claude code back in sort of February of 2025 and it took off like crazy. And a bunch of people started signing up for $200 a month accounts. And so suddenly, wow, it turns out people are willing to pay a lot of money for this stuff for that specific field. both anthropic and open AI. I spent the whole of 2025 focusing all of their training efforts on coding. If you look at what they were doing, it was all the reinforcement learning stuff, the reasoning trick, the thing where the models say they're thinking, that was new in late 2024, like Open AIs 01 was the first model to exhibit that. And now all of the models do it. So that was the other big trend of last year was these reasoning models. Turns out reasoning is great for code. It can reason through code and figure.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lots of people knew that those little O-rings were unreliable, but every single time you get away with launching a space shuttle without the O-rings failing, you institutionally feel more confident in what you're doing. We've been using these systems in an increasingly unsafe ways. This is going to catch up with us. My prediction is that we're going to see a challenge disaster.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer. I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems. By 11 a.m., I am wiped out.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, probably 95% of the code that I produce, I didn't type it myself. I write so much of my code on my phone, it's wild. I can get good work done walking the dog along the beach. My New Year's resolution, every previous year, I've always told myself this year I'm going to focus more. I'm going to take on less things. This year, my ambition was take on more stuff and be more ambitious.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people woke up in January and February and started realizing, oh, wow, I can churn out 10,000 lines of code in a day. It used to be you'd ask ChatGPT for some code and it would spit out some code and you have to run it and test it. The coding agents, they take that step for you. And an open question for me is how many other knowledge work fields are actually prone to these agent loops.”
2026-04-02 · Lenny's Podcast · An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source