Simon Willison

Hey, it's really exciting to be here.

We've just been nerding out about servers outside on the shop floor.

It's been great.

I feel pretty good about that one.

I said that 2026-25 would not be the year of agents.

That one I think I got wrong because it kind of was the year of agents.

But I did specifically call out that human replacement agents weren't going to happen.

Coding agents and research agents were.

And that I nailed.

Research agents, the first six months of this year was all about deep research.

And then coding agents...

Oh, my goodness.

Yes.

There is one thing I'll say, which is that coding agents are actually general-purpose agents.

Like, Cloud Code is not about code.

Cloud Code is about anything you can automate by running bash commands, which is everything.

So actually, if you know what you're doing, Cloud Code is a general-purpose agent that can solve any problem that you can attach to a bash script.

Well, this is the thing I realized is that the reason coding agents work so well is that code is reversible.

Like we have Git, we can undo our mistakes.

The moment you use these things to something where you can't undo a mistake, everything goes to pieces.