Simon Willison’s Weblog

Something I like about our weird new LLM-assisted world is the number of people I know who are coding again, having mostly stopped as they moved into management roles or lost their personal side project time to becoming parents.

AI assistance means you can get something useful done in half an hour, or even while you are doing other stuff. You don't need to carve out 2-4 hours to ramp up anymore.

If you have significant previous coding experience - even if it's a few years stale - you can drive these things really effectively. Especially if you have management experience, quite a lot of which transfers to "managing" coding agents - communicate clearly, set achievable goals, provide all relevant context. Here's a relevant recent tweet from Ethan Mollick:

When you see how people use Claude Code/Codex/etc it becomes clear that managing agents is really a management problem

Can you specify goals? Can you provide context? Can you divide up tasks? Can you give feedback?

These are teachable skills. Also UIs need to support management

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