simonw

114 ms·

1. 2581.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   Measuring productivity in software development is notoriously hard, but the demos I saw them give when the team of three people had been working together for three months showed more work then I would ever expect from a team of that size ov
2. 2582.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   I enjoy the kind of problem solving you are describing there too. That's why I like being able to point LLMs at them first - if they can find the fix I get to save a bunch of time and spend it on more interesting problems, and if they
3. 2583.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   Comments like "X is the right track [...] Then finish with a question?" do have a bit of an LLM smell to them. The finishing with a question thing is prevalent with both accounts on Twitter, presumably because it "drives enga
4. 2584.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   How about bug fixing? Give someone a repo with a tricky bug, ask them to figure it out with the help of their coding agent of choice.
5. 2585.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   Are you saying that because I have a blog I should be banned from going to meetings or demos of anything, for any reason?
6. 2586.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   Sounds like a great opportunity for my company! Who can I hire to help me figure out how to do this stuff?
7. 2587.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   If that team is producing 4x what they would be producing without LLMs then spending 2x their salaries on tooling sees financially rational to me. (I know, that's a very big "if".)
8. 2588.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   What coding agent are you using where the code doesn't even compile!?
9. 2589.▲
   by simonw 9mo ago

   tinycc wasn't written in Rust.
10. 2590.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    It's the dark factory people, yeah: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46739117#46801848
11. 2591.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Of the list I gave you, at a guess: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, Alibaba (Qwen), Nvidia, Mistral, xAI - and likely more of the Chinese labs but I don't know much about their size.
12. 2592.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Some of us bloggers have been writing about cool tech for 20+ years already. We didn't need to get paid to do it then, why should we need to be paid now?
13. 2593.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    > Who else has the sort of resources to train and run SOTA models at scale? Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Amazon, Reka AI, Alibaba (Qwen), 01 AI, Cohere, DeepSeek, Nvidia, Mistral, NexusFlow, Z.ai (GLM), xAI, Ai2, Princeton, Tencent,
14. 2594.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    I do find value in papers. I have a series of posts where I dig into papers that I find noteworthy and try to translate them into more easily understood terms. I wish more people would do that - it frustrates me that paper authors themselv
15. 2595.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Provided the sponsored content is labelled "sponsored content" this is above board. If it's not labelled it's in violation of FTC regulations, for both the companies and the individuals. [ That said... I'm surprised
16. 2596.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    The problem with naming my consulting clients that some of them won't want to be named. I don't want to turn down paid work because I have a popular blog. I have a very strong policy that I won't write about someone because t
17. 2597.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Yeah, they've not produced as much detail as I'd hoped - but there's still enough good stuff in there that it's a valuable set of information.
18. 2598.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    That's in this repo: https://github.com/strongdm/attractor
19. 2599.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    The multi-agent "swarm" thing (that seems to be the term that's bubbling to the top at the moment) is so new and frothy that is difficult to determine how useful it actually is. StrongDM's implementation is the most impr
20. 2600.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Out of interest, what anti-patterns did you see? (I'm continuing to try to learn Rust!)
21. 2601.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    The one question I have that isn't answered by the page is how much faster ? Obviously they can't make promises but I'd still like a rough indication of how much this might improve the speed of responses.
22. 2602.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    The "social engineering" is that I was invited to a demo back in October and thought it was really interesting. (Two people who's opinions I respect said "yeah you really should accept that invitation" otherwise I p
23. 2603.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Honestly I've not found a huge amount of value from the "science". There are plenty of papers out there that look at LLM productivity and every one of them seems to have glaring methodology limitations and/or reports on
24. 2604.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    It's current. I last modified it in October: https://github.com/simonw/simonwillisonblog/commits/main/tem...
25. 2605.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    They actually "exited" a few weeks ago - acquired by Delinea: https://delinea.com/news/delinea-strongdm-to-unite-redefine-... From what I've heard the acquisition was unrelated to their AI lab work, it w
26. 2606.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    No.
27. 2607.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Important to note that this is the approach taken by their AI research lab over the past six months, it's not (yet) reflective of how they build the core product.
28. 2608.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    There's actual code in this repo: https://github.com/strongdm/cxdb
29. 2609.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    Yeah I'm going to update my piece to talk more about that. Edit: here's that section: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/#wait-...
30. 2610.▲
    by simonw 9mo ago

    That's a genuine problem now. If you launch a new feature and your competition can ship their own copy a few hours later the competitive dynamics get really challenging! My hunch is that the thing that's going to matter is network