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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars... Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools

Ben L
@bnej80.bsky.social

I wouldn't argue with that, but it supposes that the main issue with software development is the speed of production of code, and it is certainly not. Nothing I have seen has convinced me that no silver bullet is not still valid. We are still not reducing any of the essential complexity.

libpol.org
@libpol.org

I used to hold this view, but after a year of using agents since sonnet 3.5 up to now, I am realizing that I am getting some sort of free lunch with the latest agents. it won't work for every codebase, but for a lot of them, reducing the effort to add a feature by 95% helps immensely

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Ben L
@bnej80.bsky.social

So for me, I observed the project outcomes between my team where they did or didn't adopt AI assistance, and there is not an observable difference. Other factors are way larger.