Quoting Les Orchard

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: CodeRabbit — Planner helps 10x your coding agents while minimizing rework and AI slop. Try Now. Here's what I think is happening: AI-assisted coding is exposing a divide among developers that was always there but maybe less visible. Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft-lovers and the make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. Now there's a fork in the road. You can let the machine write the code and focus on directing what gets built, or you can insist on hand-crafting it. And suddenly the reason you got into this in the first place becomes visible, because the two camps are making different choices at that fork. — Les Orchard, Grief and the AI Split Posted 12th March 2026 at 4:28 pm Recent articles My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit - 14th March 2026 Perhaps not Boring Technology after all - 9th March 2026 Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026 This is a quotation collected by Simon Willison, posted on 12th March 2026. les-orchard 12 careers 71 ai 1913 generative-ai 1696 llms 1662 ai-assisted-programming 364 deep-blue 7 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