Simon Willison’s Weblog

Agentic Engineering Patterns >

AI should help us produce better code

Many developers worry that outsourcing their code to AI tools will result in a drop in quality, producing bad code that's churned out fast enough that decision makers are willing to overlook its flaws.

If adopting coding agents demonstrably reduces the quality of the code and features you are producing, you should address that problem directly: figure out which aspects of your process are hurting the quality of your output and fix them.

Shipping worse code with agents is a choice. We can choose to ship code that is better instead. [... 838 words]

# 10:25 pm / coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms