The cognitive impact of coding agents

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: WorkOS — Production-ready APIs for auth and access control, so you can ship faster. A fun thing about recording a podcast with a professional like Lenny Rachitsky is that his team know how to slice the resulting video up into TikTok-sized short form vertical videos. Here's one he shared on Twitter today which ended up attracting over 1.1m views! That was 48 seconds. Our full conversation lasted 1 hour 40 minutes. Posted 3rd April 2026 at 11:57 pm Recent articles The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering - 3rd April 2026 Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast - 2nd April 2026 Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer - 30th March 2026 This is a note by Simon Willison, posted on 3rd April 2026. ai 1947 generative-ai 1728 llms 1694 podcast-appearances 38 ai-ethics 286 coding-agents 189 cognitive-debt 10 agentic-engineering 38 Monthly briefing Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments. Pay me to send you less! Sponsor & subscribe Disclosures Colophon © 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 2026