Feeling sad about AI
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison ● Covered by 8 sources
Opinion — commentary, not a factual news event.
AI coding can hit a week’s work in an hour, and that’s rattling people. Simon Willison says the fix is to adapt, because software has never stayed still for long.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Simon Willison is pushing back on the wave of gloom around AI coding. The immediate shock is real: when a coding agent can do in an hour something that would have taken a week, it’s easy to feel like the floor just moved under your feet. He says he’s seen that reaction before, including in himself a few years ago.
His point is that the dread tends to fade once the job is reframed. Writing code from an exact spec is no longer a uniquely human trick. But software engineering has always been bigger than that, and the hard part now is seeing the wider set of problems still sitting there.
That’s where experience starts to matter. Willison argues that people with depth can learn these tools, use them well, and add more value than someone who is only just starting out with agents. The newcomer may be fast at producing code. The veteran still knows what to build, what to ignore, and how to steer the whole thing.
And if a profession can’t tolerate any change at all, software was probably the wrong one to bet on. Willison’s broader message is blunt: the tools and languages in this field have never been stable for long, and AI is just accelerating that old pattern.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the part of AI that gets lost under the hype: the fear is often a skills mismatch, not a prophecy. If software people are suddenly upset that tools keep changing, they’ve apparently skipped the last few decades of software. The real mistake is treating agent speed as the whole job, which is a very expensive way to discover that knowing what matters still matters.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog
