Professional AI-assisted coding needs a new term—'agentic engineering'—distinct from casual 'vibe coding,' with verification as the core challenge.
“when you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists”
simon-willison
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LLMs have made open source's promise of user-modifiable software practically feasible for the first time
“I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.”
Simon Willison demos Datasette agent, an LLM-powered plugin for querying data, model-agnostic and offline-capable.
“the hello world of programming in 2026 is to build an agent”
Simon Willison released llm-typesafe 0.1a0, a plugin adding TypeSafe AI's Jev model to the LLM tool.
“I built this new plugin for LLM to add support for TypeSafe AI's new Jev model.”
sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds bundled database migrations and nested atomic transactions support.
“The system is deliberately small: it doesn't provide reverse migrations, so any mistakes you make should be fixed by deploying a fresh migration to undo them.”
Refusing to find LLMs interesting is like a geneticist ignoring a real Jurassic Park.
“Being a computer scientist who refuses to find anything about LLMs interesting right now is a bit like being a geneticist who refuses to find anything interesting about the recently opened Jurassic Park.”
Simon Willison's May newsletter teases that AI got expensive while Anthropic had a strong month.
“Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month”
John Gruber advocates live-performance mindset over perfectionism for consistent blogging output
“If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I'd never get anything out.”
Simon Willison advises bloggers to publish imperfect work rather than accumulate drafts
“My number one tip for blogging is to lower your standards! Aim to hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all.”