Simon Willison’s Weblog

Agentic Coding: The Future of Software Development with Agents. Armin Ronacher delivers a 37 minute YouTube talk describing his adventures so far with Claude Code and agentic coding methods.

A friend called Claude Code catnip for programmers and it really feels like this. I haven't felt so energized and confused and just so willing to try so many new things... it is really incredibly addicting.

I picked up a bunch of useful tips from this video:

• Armin runs Claude Code with the --dangerously-skip-permissions option, and says this unlocks a huge amount of productivity. I haven't been brave enough to do this yet but I'm going to start using that option while running in a Docker container to ensure nothing too bad can happen.
• When your agentic coding tool can run commands in a terminal you can mostly avoid MCP - instead of adding a new MCP tool, write a script or add a Makefile command and tell the agent to use that instead. The only MCP Armin uses is the Playwright one.
• Combined logs are a really good idea: have everything log to the same place and give the agent an easy tool to read the most recent N log lines.
• While running Claude Code, use Gemini CLI to run sub-agents, to perform additional tasks without using up Claude Code's own context
• Designing additional tools that provide very clear errors, so the agents can recover when something goes wrong.
• Thanks to Playwright, Armin has Claude Code perform all sorts of automated operations via a signed in browser instance as well. "Claude can debug your CI... it can sign into a browser, click around, debug..." - he also has it use the gh GitHub CLI tool to interact with things like GitHub Actions workflows.