Simon Willison

Why would I not wait?

I've just got the one.

I think the job of being paid money to type code into a computer will go the same way as punching punch cards.

I think in six years' time, I do not think anyone will be paid to just do the thing where you type the code.

Yes.

Okay.

I think software engineering will still be an enormous career.

I just think the software engineers won't be spending multiple hours of their day in a text editor typing out syntax.

I think so, yeah.

um and but software engineering still very much exists i believe so i i hope so i very much hope so because i think the um the challenge of being a software engineer is not remembering how if what if what for loops look like it is understanding what computers can do and how to turn fuzzy human requirements into actual like working software and that's

That's what we're for.

And I think we'll still be doing that, just a lot more of it and a lot more ambitious scale.

I think they probably look at it occasionally.

A little bit.

Who debugs it?

I hate to say it, but the agents debug it themselves.

This is a really interesting thing I've been seeing just in the past three months around coding agents is that four months ago, I was absolutely on team.

You cannot commit a line of code that you've not read, reviewed, and understood that these things have written for you.

That's just irresponsible to do that.

I'm edging away from that a little bit because it turns out the art of using these effectively is get them to prove to you that the thing they've written has worked.