Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

"If the whole thing collapses, as many people fear, the careless repetition of hype by editors who love the “everything is about to change” narrative (always good for clicks) may well turn out to have been an important contributing factor."

Over on threads someone just use ai;dr and we all need to adopt that right quick

"AI labs are moving up the stack not from strength but from necessity, because the model layer is commoditizing faster than enterprises can be rewired. These players recognize that orchestration, not intelligence, is the real control point."

If your cycle time sucks, automating coding won't do anything to your delivery pipeline. You've got 99 problems, but the pace of coding ain't one. by @paulisthrivving.xyz medium.com/thrivve-part...

Interesting research in HBR today about how the productivity boost you can get from AI tools can lead to burnout or general metal exhaustion, something I've noticed in my own work simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/a...

NEW POST Powerful context engineering is becoming a huge part of the developer experience of modern LLM tools. @birgitta410.bsky.social explains the current state of context configuration features, using Claude Code as an example. martinfowler.com/articles/exp...

One of the critical things that distinguishes a senior developer from a junior developer is an understanding, deep in their bones, that the cost of DOING a thing is cheap compared to the cost of truly FINISHING a thing and utterly trivial compared to the cost of MAINTAINING a thing. Like 1:10:10000.

1) Software engineering is not about building features 2) Refactoring is a business problem 3) Software engineering is not an engineering practice 4) LLMs will not replace software engineers 5) Architects don't make decisions by @swardley.bsky.social & @tudorgirba.com medium.com/feenk/rewild...

A statement I totally subscribe to: "Established open source projects have a massive, compounding advantage in the AI era: years of training data." petabridge.com/blog/ai-wont...

Fragments: How AI is changing Anthropic's internal development, a detailed account of using LLM to program a knowledge management tool, obvious-easy-possible buckets for interface design, specifications cannot be complete, and lightweight tools to work with LLMs martinfowler.com/fragments/20...

My longer analysis on what happens to software engineering, as a profession, if and when AI writes most of the code: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/when-ai-wr...

I joined the Oxide and Friends annual predictions podcast episode this week - here are my 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for AI and LLMs (and Kākāpō parrots) simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/l...

I'll be doing (as usual) the challenges & changes part

A world without people - AI is a promise to wire the boss’s toy steering wheel directly into the company’s drivetrain. | by Cory Doctorow buff.ly/b7J6SQE #ai #trends #labor

A field guide to sandboxes for AI https://lobste.rs/s/l9gkjo ##devops ##virtualization ##ai

And in case you missed the #ILSpy release itself: github.com/icsharpcode/...

🚀 This week I improved MTP (Microsoft.Testing.Platform) to support WASM, browser, WASI 🌐 and made progress on Android 🤖📱 & iOS 🍎📱. Modern apps deserve modern testing, MTP makes it simple, fast, and future-ready! #dotnet #testing #MTP

Given #minio is on the way out, I kludged together a small sample of #Aspire and #RustFS. AppHost.cs and Program.cs as demoware as can be github.com/christophwil... / github.com/christophwil... #dotnet

The recording of yesterday's talk "Testcontainers - Integration Testing Done Right" is online www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q4T..., samples and slides can be found at github.com/christophwil... #dotnet #Testcontainers

Get yourself a copy of "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" www.goodreads.com/book/show/22... for Christmas

TechEd Europe 2001 - Talking about SOAP in the Bathtub - Don Box - 2001/07 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULCm...

In two weeks, we are happy to have Christoph Wille as a speaker at our next event! He is talking about Testcontainers and how to use them correctly in integration tests. Thanks to LEAN-CODERS & @uter.bsky.social for hosting us this time! Registration link: dotnetdevs.at/events/2025-... #dotnet

How is AI changing software development? Martin Fowler (@martinfowler.com) says AI is the biggest shift in the field since high-level languages appeared (ones like Fortran or C, offering a new abstraction level to code at, versus Assembly): Full epsiode: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQmI... (cont'd)

I didn't even mention beans once

My notes on Google's new Antigravity IDE - at first glance it looks like yet another VS Code fork but there are some interesting new ideas in there simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/...

☕️ Caffeinated and still in action! After a great coffee break, we’re diving into the next round of sessions with Christoph Wille, Amaury Levé, @codewithanjuli.bsky.social, and Ayesha Kaleem. #UCP25

Back to the action! We’re powering through more cutting-edge dev sessions with our amazing speakers: Chris Woodruff, Leo Visser, Barbara Forbes, and Christoph Wille. Expect sharp insights, actionable techniques, and plenty of aha moments. The ultimate boost for your dev brain. 🚀

You want to base your decision to attend "Extensibility in .NET Applications with #WebAssembly" and/or "#Testcontainers - Integration Testing Done Right" at prague.updateconf.net on more than the session descriptions? Go check out github.com/christophwil... for slides & demos #UCP25 #dotnet

Chris Lattner is one of the most influential engineers of the past two decades. He created LLVM, Swift, contributed to TensorFlow, and created the Mojo language. What was the story about creating Swift - and why did he face resistance inside Apple when wanting to replace Objective C? (cont'd)

The promise of AI chat assistants: they solve 90% of the problems users have (by looking up the docs and telling them) My reality: need to spend 10 minutes trying to get to a human, to solve an issue I need customer support to look into Around minute 8 I sign up to a competitor

New on the blog: Think for Yourself "You're about to commit a chunk of LLM-generated code into your product's codebase. Before you do, however, pause to consider and act on these questions." kevlinhenney.medium.com/think-for-yo...

If I ever become Ruler of the World, I'll shut down AWS us-east-1 every couple of years just to see who is dependent on it.

The talk recording from @lauratacho.com at Cloud Native Days Austria is available, highly recommended to watch (AI minus BS) www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ1F...

Exclusive: Anthropic spent $2.66 billion on Amazon Web Services in the first three quarters of 2025, around 100% of their estimated revenue. Its costs appear to increase with their revenue, showing little path to profitability. www.wheresyoured.at/costs/

However, companies will start hiring again simply because work needs to get done, and they can't get that work done cost-effectively with vibe coding and no people. They'll have to pay through the nose for those programmers, but that's just poetic justice. It's fine by me. 7/7

This learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answer... is a prime example of unhelpful copy paste of AI slop. AI rephrasing my question and the "support guy" not giving a shit. #dotnet #Microsoft #Azure

Business is rapidly achieving peak bullshit. decision.substack.com/p/have-you-b...

How many folks have actually experienced a CEO or manager pressuring them to use AI in a way that's dumb or out of touch?

Use Hugging Face Inference Providers with GitHub Copilot Chat in VS Code huggingface.co/docs/inferen...

Visual Studio 2026 Insiders is now available for download. Check out the announcement and try it out for yourself! devblogs.microsoft.com/visualstudio...

If you haven't yet, make sure to watch www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHHl...

Cory Doctorow at CF25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ai-...

Newsletter: My 16,000 word opus - How To Argue With An AI Booster, a comprehensive guide to arguing with AI boosters, addressing both their bad faith debate style and their specific (and flimsy) arguments as to why generative AI is the future. www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue...

Took some time today to catch up with Johann Rehberger's Month of AI Bugs and wow... 15 examples so far of major prompt injection vulnerabilities in products including ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor, Amp, Devin, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and Google Jules simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/15/...

THAT www.techradar.com/computing/wi... will actually even make me consider leaving Windows behind.

People claim they get 10x productivity boosts with AI coding tools. After my recent experiments with Claude Code, I'm starting to think we're not using these tools the same way. Or that they’re just lying. Or both. 1/

We recently ran an experiment to explore how far GenAI can currently be pushed toward autonomously developing high-quality, up-to-date software without human intervention, and gather observations about where it breaks down. martinfowler.com/articles/pus...

A #csharp 14.0 feature to expect in the next #ILSpy preview for #dotnet 10 is extension members (not final, see github.com/icsharpcode/...)