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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.

Eric Lee
@saintgimp.bsky.social

Information theory could be of use here (not an info theorist myself). Complexity can't be destroyed, only transformed and hidden. Like any compression algo that makes one file smaller must make some other file larger. If prompting becomes the face of programming, where does the complexity go?

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

This is why I'm not on board with the idea that we will all switch to building software with owners and not care about the underlying code The code is where the complexity lies. The best software will be written by engineers who continue to care about that code quality just like they do today

1 repost4 likes

Eric Lee
@saintgimp.bsky.social

Agree! By the way, this is a fantastic thread that feels like the early days of Twitter (RIP) where smart people were all sharing ideas and learning from each other. Kudos!