Simon Willison’s Weblog

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

# 4:10 am / careers, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

Something I've realized about LLM tool use is that it means that if you can reduce a problem to something that can be solved by an LLM in a sandbox using tools in a loop, you can brute force that problem.

The challenge then becomes identifying those problems and figuring out how to configure a sandbox for them, what tools to provide and how to define the success criteria for the model.

That still takes significant skill and experience, but it's at a higher level than chewing through that problem using trial and error by hand.

My x86 assembly experiment with Claude Code was the thing that made this click for me.

# 2:28 pm / llm-tool-use, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code, sandboxing, generative-ai, ai, llms