Simon Willison explores how AI coding agents have made writing code nearly free, while good code still requires significant effort and new engineering practices. The article discusses the shift from expensive code …
SWE-Lancer introduces a comprehensive benchmark of over 1,400 real freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork worth $1 million USD, evaluating frontier language models on both individual contributor coding tasks …
A randomized controlled study examining how AI assistance affects skill formation in software development, finding that while AI can improve productivity, it significantly impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, …
AI Agents Are Starting to Eat SaaS: A Hacker News Discussion A vigorous debate erupted on Hacker News about whether AI agents will replace SaaS products. CTOs and developers shared real experiences replacing …
What is ‘Good Taste’ in Software Engineering? Insights from Hacker News Software engineering discussions often center on technical correctness, but a deeper quality emerges in experienced developers: good …
Roy Lee’s Interview Coder: Cheating or a Wake Up Call? A Columbia CS student built an AI tool that helps candidates cheat in coding interviews, sparking debate about fairness and the future of technical hiring. Roy …
Engineering AI Systems That Endure: Beyond the Bitter Lesson Building reliable AI systems while navigating weekly model releases and evolving techniques requires rethinking how we apply engineering principles to …
Disciplined AI Software Development: A Structured Methodology for AI-Human Collaboration AI-assisted development often produces bloated code, architectural inconsistencies, and context drift across sessions. The …
Augmented Coding: Beyond the Vibes Kent Beck distinguishes between casual AI assistance and disciplined augmented coding through his ambitious B+ Tree implementation project. The difference transforms how developers …
Should we revisit Extreme Programming in the age of AI? AI coding tools generate thousands of lines of code in minutes, but this speed creates new risks. Extreme Programming (XP) practices—designed for rapid feedback and …
