Simon Willison
13 statements across 1 episodes · 6 bullish · 4 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Apr 2, 2026 by Simon Willison · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Simon Willison's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Simon Willison, oldest first
Apr 2, 2026 positive
Willison: LLM search integration is now better at searching than humans
“Now that all of the major models have really good search integration, they're just better at searching than I am. I can ask them a question and watch them fire off five searches in parallel for like aspects of answering that question, pull the data back.”
Apr 2, 2026 bullish
Apr 2, 2026 bullish
Apr 2, 2026 positive
Willison: Agentic coding removes developers' need for multi-hour focus blocks
“People talk about how important it is not to interrupt your coders, right? Your coders needs to have Like solid two to four hour blocks of uninterrupted work so they can spin up their mental model and tune out the code. It's some, that that's changed completel…”
Apr 2, 2026 positive
Willison: Coding agents become truly productive only in permissionless 'unsafe' mode
“I think a lot of people who haven't got on board with coding agents yet, haven't tried them in the unsafe mode. They're using coding agent where it's like, oh, can I run this piece of code? Can I edit this file? And that means you have to pay complete attentio…”
Apr 2, 2026 bearish
Apr 2, 2026 negative
Apr 2, 2026 negative
Willison: Minimal code skeletons guide AI agents better than long Claude.md instructions
“So sometimes, some people will tell you should have a Claude.md with like paragraphs of text describing how you like to work. I don't tend to do that because instead I start with a very thin skeleton that just gives it enough hints on how I like to work that i…”
Apr 2, 2026 positive
Willison: AI coding agents make verbose, extensive test suites economical
“If you look at a repo and there's huge amounts of tests that aren't really doing anything interesting, that's really expensive because now when you change the code, you've got to update a thousand lines of tests and all of that.
It turns out I don't care anymo…”
Apr 2, 2026 neutral
Willison: AI makes rapid prototyping almost free, democratizing the skill
“Prototyping is almost free, I think. And that really impacts me because throughout my entire career, my superpower has been prototyping. Like I am very, I've been very quick at knocking out working prototypes of things. I'm the person who can show up at a meet…”
Apr 2, 2026
Apr 2, 2026 negative
Willison: AI can never have true agency without human motivations
“I think agents have no agency at all. Like I would argue that the one thing AI can never have is agency because it doesn't have human motivations. Sure. You can tell it make more money or whatever, but it's never going to be able to decide on its, like what ma…”