Simon Willison’s Weblog

Gergely Orosz’s edited clip of me talking about Open Source. Gergely Orosz released this clip to help promote our podcast conversation AI tools for software engineers, but without the hype - it's a neat bite-sized version of my argument for why Open Source has provided the single biggest enhancement to developer productivity I've seen in my entire career.

One of the big challenges everyone talked about was software reusability. Like, why are we writing the same software over and over again?

And at the time, people thought OOP was the answer. They were like, oh, if we do everything as classes in Java, then we can subclass those classes, and that's how we'll solve reusable software.

That wasn't the fix. The fix was open source. The fix was having a diverse and vibrant open source community releasing software that's documented and you can package and install and all of those kinds of things.

That's been incredible. The cost of building software today is a fraction of what it was 20 years ago, purely thanks to open source.

# 30th September 2024, 8:24 pm / gergely-orosz, open-source, podcast-appearances

The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast: AI tools for software engineers, but without the hype – with Simon Willison. Gergely Orosz has a brand new podcast, and I was the guest for the first episode. We covered a bunch of ground, but my favorite topic was an exploration of the (very legitimate) reasons that many engineers are resistant to taking advantage of AI-assisted programming tools.

# 25th September 2024, 5:58 pm / podcasts, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, gergely-orosz, ai, llms, podcast-appearances

How Anthropic built Artifacts. Gergely Orosz interviews five members of Anthropic about how they built Artifacts on top of Claude with a small team in just three months.

The initial prototype used Streamlit, and the biggest challenge was building a robust sandbox to run the LLM-generated code in:

We use iFrame sandboxes with full-site process isolation. This approach has gotten robust over the years. This protects users' main Claude.ai browsing session from malicious artifacts. We also use strict Content Security Policies (CSPs) to enforce limited and controlled network access.

Artifacts were launched in general availability yesterday - previously you had to turn them on as a preview feature. Alex Albert has a 14 minute demo video up on Twitter showing the different forms of content they can create, including interactive HTML apps, Markdown, HTML, SVG, Mermaid diagrams and React Components.

# 28th August 2024, 11:28 pm / claude-artifacts, anthropic, claude, gergely-orosz, ai, llms, alex-albert, sandboxing, iframes, security, ai-assisted-programming

AI Tooling for Software Engineers in 2024. Gergely Orosz reports back on the survey he ran of 211 tech professionals concerning their use of generative AI. One interesting result:

The responses reveal that as many professionals are using both ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot as all other tools combined!

I agree with Gergely's conclusion:

We’re in the midst of a significant tooling change, with AI-augmented software engineering becoming widespread across tech. Basically, these tools have too many upsides for developers to ignore them: it’s easier and faster to switch between stacks, easier to get started on projects, and simpler to become productive in unfamiliar codebases. Of course there are also downsides, but being aware of them means they can be mitigated.

# 17th July 2024, 5:19 pm / generative-ai, chatgpt, github-copilot, ai, llms, gergely-orosz, ai-assisted-programming