The Hallway Track

ai-assisted-programming

11 tracked signals on ai-assisted-programming.

Quoting Boris Cherny

Simon Willison · Sep 11, 2026

Production code by Claude requires higher standards than human-written code.

“At Anthropic, we have many guardrails in place to make sure this is happening.”
Quoting Linus Torvalds

Simon Willison · Aug 22, 2026

Linus Torvalds used AI as a debug assistant on Linux kernel code, crediting it with commit message authorship.

“And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.”
Quoting Paul Dix

Simon Willison · Aug 26, 2026

AI wrote and refined 1M LOC to produce software now running on millions of machines

“If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works.”
Quoting Florian Herrengt

Simon Willison · Aug 12, 2026

AI-assisted development is creating codebases no human engineer understands

“Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident.”
Quoting Charity Majors

Simon Willison · Jun 17, 2026

In 2025 the economics of code production inverted, making code effectively free, instant, and disposable.

“the economics of code production were turned upside down”
commit-rewriter 0.1

Simon Willison · Sep 14, 2026

Release of commit-rewriter 0.1 to edit commit messages.

Reverse-engineering is cheap now

Simon Willison · Jul 20, 2026

Coding agents make reverse-engineering home devices economically viable by slashing effort and maintenance anxiety

“Coding agents change that equation entirely. The effort to get a simple automation working has dropped, as has the cost of trying and failing to get it to work.”
Devtools must be open source (exe.dev)

Simon Willison · Aug 03, 2026

LLMs have made open source's promise of user-modifiable software practically feasible for the first time

“I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.”
simonw/browser-compat-db

Simon Willison · Jun 24, 2026

Simon Willison used Claude Code (Opus 4.8) and Codex (GPT-5.5) to convert MDN's browser-compat-data into a CDN-hosted SQLite database.

“I decided to try converting their comprehensive mdn/browser-compat-data repository full of browser compatibility data into a SQLite database.”
datasette 1.0a33

Simon Willison · Jun 11, 2026

Datasette 1.0a33 extends the ?_extra= API pattern to queries and rows on the road to 1.0.

“Because API explorer tools are almost free to build now”
Pasted File Editor

Simon Willison · Jun 02, 2026

Simon Willison prototyped a Pasted File Editor tool replicating claude.ai's large-paste-to-file-attachment behavior using Codex.

“I really like how you can paste a large volume of text into claude.ai (or the Claude desktop/mobile apps) and it will detect it as a large paste and turn it into a file attachment instead.”