Quoting David Abram

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: WorkOS — The infrastructure fast-growing B2B companies use to sell to Enterprise. I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making decisions that would save months of pain later. None of these problems can be solved LLMs. They can suggest code, help with boilerplate, sometimes can act as a sounding board. But they don't understand the system, they don't carry context in their "minds", and they certianly don't know why a decision is right or wrong. And the most importantly, they don't choose. That part is still yours. The real work of software development, the part that makes someone valuable, is knowing what should exist in the first place, and why. — David Abram, The machine didn't take your craft. You gave it up. Posted 23rd March 2026 at 6:56 pm Recent articles Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills - 22nd March 2026 Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments - 21st March 2026 Thoughts on OpenAI acquiring Astral and uv/ruff/ty - 19th March 2026 This is a quotation collected by Simon Willison, posted on 23rd March 2026. careers 72 ai 1925 generative-ai 1707 llms 1673 ai-assisted-programming 366 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