Readit NewsWith LLMs its admittedly a bit closer to doing it yourself because the feedback loop is much tighter
Also, Simon, with all due respect, and I mean it, I genuinely look in awe at the amount of posts you have on your blog and your dedication, but it’s clear to anyone that the projects you created and launched before 2022 far exceed anything you’ve done since. And I will be the first to say that I don’t think that’s because of LLMs not being able to help you. But I do think it’s because what makes you really, really good at engineering you kept replacing slowly but surely with LLMs more and more by the month.
If I look at Django, I can clearly see your intelligence, passion, and expertise there. Do you feel that any of the projects you’ve written since LLMs are the main thing you focus on are similar?
Think about it this way: 100% of you wins against 100% of me any day. 100% of Claude running on your computer is the same as 100% of Claude running on mine. 95% of Claude and 5% of you, while still better than me (and your average Joe), is nowhere near the same jump from 95% Claude and 5% me.
I do worry when I see great programmers like you diluting their work.
I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it is true. Take simonw and tymscar, put them each in charge of a team of 19 engineers (of identical capabilities). Is the result "nowhere near the same jump" as simonw vs. tymscar alone? I think it's potentially a much bigger jump, if there are differences in who has better ideas and not just who can code the fastest.
I feel like this is not the same for everyone. For some people, the "fire" is literally about "I control a computer", for others "I'm solving a problem for others", and yet for others "I made something that made others smile/cry/feel emotions" and so on.
I think there is a section of programmer who actually do like the actual typing of letters, numbers and special characters into a computer, and for them, I understand LLMs remove the fun part. For me, I initially got into programming because I wanted to ruin other people's websites, then I figured out I needed to know how to build websites first, then I found it more fun to create and share what I've done with others, and they tell me what they think of it. That's my "fire". But I've met so many people who doesn't care an iota about sharing what they built with others, it matters nothing to them.
I guess the conclusion is, not all programmers program for the same reason, for some of us, LLMs helps a lot, and makes things even more fun. For others, LLMs remove the core part of what makes programming fun for them. Hence we get this constant back and forth of "Can't believe others can work like this!" vs "I can't believe others aren't working like this!", but both sides seems to completely miss the other side.
Anecdotally, I’ve had a few coworkers go from putting themselves firmly in this category to saying “this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my career” in the last two months. The recent improvement in models and coding agents (Claude Code with Opus 4.5 in our case) is changing a lot of minds.
The opencode team[^1][^2] built an entire custom TUI backend that supports a good subset of HTML/CSS and the TypeScript ecosystem (i.e. not tied to Opencode, a generic TUI renderer). Then, they built the product as a client/server, so you can use the agent part of it for whatever you want, separate from the TUI. And THEN, since they implemented the TUI as a generic client, they could also build a web view and desktop view over the same server.
It also doesn't flicker at 30 FPS whenever it spawns a subagent.
That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many QoL features in opencode that put CC to shame. Again, CC is a magical tool, but the actual nuts and bolts engineering of it is pretty damning for "LLMs will write all of our code soon". I'm sorry, but I'm a decent-systems-programmer-but-terminal-moron and I cranked out a raymarched 3D renderer in the terminal for a Claude Wrapped[^] in a weekend that...doesn't flicker. I don't mean that in a look-at-me way. I mean that in a "a mid-tier systems programmer isn't making these mistakes" kind of way.
Anyway, this is embarrassing for Anthropic. I get that opencode shouldn't have been authenticating this way. I'm not saying what they are doing is a rug pull, or immoral. But there's a reason people use this tool instead of your first party one. Maybe let those world class systems designers who created the runtime that powers opencode get their hands on your TUI before nicking something that is an objectively better product.
[^1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opentui
[^2] From my loose following of the development, not a monolith, and the person mostly responsible for the TUI framework is https://x.com/kmdrfx
- secondary transaction with the preferred shareholders (VCs) at some price that implies a 20b valuation
- founders quit and get new employment agreements
- some cash is transferred to the company as a license fee
- no acquisition means no DOJ approval
in this scenario the headline can be $20b but the cash expense can be much lower, you have full flexibility to direct whatever cash or equity you want to founders vs the rest of the company, as an up front payment or as retention/salary, and the founders have no hinderance from working on anything they touched at previous company because of IP license.
I actually bet this is how it went down. This is becoming the standard in the industry and it's just awful for the future of SV
Has there been any evidence yet that the VCs got paid for their shares but the left behind employees didn’t?
Em dash forever! Along with en dash for numerical ranges, true ellipsis not that three-period crap, true typographic quotes, and all the trimmings! Good typography whenever and wherever possible!
It's barely readable to humans, but directly and efficiently relevant to LLM's (direct reference -> referent, without language verbiage).
This suggests some (compressed) index format that is always loaded into context will replace heuristics around agents.md/claude.md/skills.md.
So I would bet this year we get some normalization of both the indexes and the referenced documentation (esp. matching terms).
Possibly also a side issue: API's could repurpose their test suites as validation to compare LLM performance of code tasks.
LLM's create huge adoption waves. Libraries/API's will have to learn to surf them or be limited to usage by humans.