Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

Simon Willison’s Weblog Subscribe Sponsored by: WorkOS — The infrastructure fast-growing B2B companies use to sell to Enterprise. Thoughts on slowing the fuck down. Mario Zechner created the Pi agent framework used by OpenClaw, giving considerable credibility to his opinions on current trends in agentic engineering. He's not impressed: We have basically given up all discipline and agency for a sort of addiction, where your highest goal is to produce the largest amount of code in the shortest amount of time. Consequences be damned. Agents and humans both make mistakes, but agent mistakes accumulate much faster: A human is a bottleneck. A human cannot shit out 20,000 lines of code in a few hours. Even if the human creates such booboos at high frequency, there's only so many booboos the human can introduce in a codebase per day. [...] With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it's too late. [...] You have zero fucking idea what's going on because you delegated all your agency to your agents. You let them run free, and they are merchants of complexity. I think Mario is exactly right about this. Agents let us move so much faster, but this speed also means that changes which we would normally have considered over the course of weeks are landing in a matter of hours. It's so easy to let the codebase evolve outside of our abilities to reason clearly about it. Cognitive debt is real. Mario recommends slowing down: Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code. Anything that defines the gestalt of your system, that is architecture, API, and so on, write it by hand. [...] I'm not convinced writing by hand is the best way to address this, but it's absolutely the case that we need the discipline to find a new balance of speed v.s. mental thoroughness now that typing out the code is no longer anywhere close to being the bottleneck on writing software. Posted 25th March 2026 at 9:47 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 link post by Simon Willison, posted on 25th March 2026. ai 1930 generative-ai 1711 llms 1677 coding-agents 184 cognitive-debt 9 agentic-engineering 33 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