[simonw]

The more time I spend working with LLMs and coding agents to help me build software the less scared I am for my future career.

They let me work so much faster, but that's because they are amplifying my existing skills and experience.

I'm confident I will be able to run rings around non-software-engineers who have access to the same tools for may years to come.

There is so much more to building software than knowing how to write code.

[WhyOhWhyQ]

Funnily enough, unrelated to this interaction I just happened to run into one of your articles on qwen-coder because I'm learning about local models.

So do you think that most of the low hanging fruit for improving these tools has already been picked because there's just so much energy going into AI these days? E.g. there's a clear boost by connecting to the internet, by configuring thinking mode, by configuring Agents (which I assume is some kind of specialized thinking mode), etc..., but perhaps the base technology could be leveling off? I was definitely lulled into a false sense of security when GPT5 underperformed, at least in the media, but this was shattered when I tried out claude.

[simonw]

It still feels really early to me. There is so much for us to figure out about how to best use this stuff - if model progress froze today I think we could still spend the next year figuring out new ways to take advantage of what we have today.

Claude Skills just a few weeks ago was one of those ideas that's obvious in hindsight but hadn't been baked into an idea yet.