An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines | Simon Willison

A lot of people woke up in January and February and started realizing, Oh wow, I can churn out 10,000 lines of code in a day. It used to be you'd ask chat GPT for some code. and it would spit out some code, then you have to run it and test it. The coding agents, they take that step for you. And an open question for me is how many other knowledge work fields are actually prone to these agent loops. Now that we have this power, people almost underestimate what they can do with it. Today Probably 95% of the code that I produce, I didn't type it myself. I write so much of my code on my phone, it's wild. I can get good work done walking the dog along the beach. My new year's resolution. Every previous year, I've always told myself this year I'm gonna focus more, I'm gonna take on less things. This year, my ambition was take on more stuff and be more ambitious. Interesting contradiction. AI is supposed to make us more productive. It feels like the people that are most AI build are working harder than they've ever worked. Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer. I can fire up four agents in parallel and have him work on four different problems by 11 a.m. I am wiped out. You have this prediction that we're gonna have a massive disaster. At some point, you call her the challenger disaster of AI. Lots of people knew that those little O-rings were unreliable, but every single time you get away with launching a space shuttle without the O-rings failing, you institutionally feel more confident in what you're doing. We've been using these systems.

In increasingly unsafe ways this is gonna catch up with us, my prediction is that we're gonna see a challenge in disaster. Today, my guest is Simon Willison. Simon, in my opinion, is one of the most important and useful voices right now on how AI is changing the way that we build software. and how professional work is changing broadly. What I love about Simon is that he doesn't just pontificate in the clouds. He's been what you'd call a 10x engineer for over 20 years. He co created Jingo, the web framework that powers Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify, and thousands of other platforms. He coined the term prompt injection.

Popularize the ideas of AI slop. And agentic engineering. And amongst us hundred plus open source projects. He created data set, a data analysis tool that has become a staple of investigative journalism. What makes Simon rare is that very few engineers have made the leap

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