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Simon Willison: coding agents make software engineering harder, not easier

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Independent commentator Simon Willison claims that the more he works with coding agents, the more convinced he is that they make software engineering harder. According to him, their full potential is unlocked only by exceptional discipline and knowledge.

Simon Willison, an independent commentator on the LLM scene, published a short note on 24 September 2026 summarizing his experience with coding agents. According to him, the more time he spends with them, the more he is convinced that they end up making software engineering harder, not easier.

Willison also acknowledges that coding agents make it possible to do amazing things. However, in his view, their full potential is unlocked only with exceptional discipline and knowledge on the part of the person using them – so the tool itself does not automatically simplify the work.

The source text is a short note without further details, concrete examples, or data. See the source article for details.

What changed

Why it matters

For developers and teams deploying coding agents with expectations of immediate simplification of their work, this is a warning that without established discipline and deeper knowledge of the tools, the result may instead be higher complexity and risk of errors. For companies, this means that investment in coding agents should go hand in hand with investment in processes and training, otherwise the expected productivity benefit may not materialize.

Two audiences, two different impacts

What this means

01

For individuals

A developer using coding agents should expect that their benefit does not come automatically, but requires sustained discipline in checking and managing their outputs.

What to do When working with coding agents, consistently check and validate their outputs rather than relying on automatic simplification of the work.
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02

For a business

Companies deploying coding agents in their development processes risk that, without appropriate process rules and team training, the expected productivity increase will fail to materialize and development complexity will instead grow.

Development
What to decide Consider supplementing the deployment of coding agents with internal rules and team training, in order to prevent an increase in complexity instead of the expected savings.
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AI coding agents Simon Willeson software engineering

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Event sources

only one source so far · 1 publisher, 1 independent. We count feeds from the same owner only once.

1
Simon Willison — AI tag (leading independent LLM commentator) community signal · first detected Note on 24th September 2026