
Anton Milan
2.5K posts

Anton Milan
@antonmil
computer vision, deep learning, robotics...



"Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer." Simon Willison (@simonw) is one of the most prolific independent software engineers and most trusted voices on how AI is changing the craft of building software. He co-created Django, coined the term "prompt injection," and popularized the terms "agentic engineering" and "AI slop." In our in-depth conversation, we discuss: 🔸 Why November 2025 was an inflection point 🔸 The "dark factory" pattern 🔸 Why mid-career engineers (not juniors) are the most at risk right now 🔸 Three agentic engineering patterns he uses daily: red/green TDD, thin templates, hoarding 🔸 Why he writes 95% of his code from his phone while walking the dog 🔸 Why he thinks we're headed for an AI Challenger disaster 🔸 How a pelican riding a bicycle became the unofficial benchmark for AI model quality Listen now 👇 youtu.be/wc8FBhQtdsA


I packaged up the "autoresearch" project into a new self-contained minimal repo if people would like to play over the weekend. It's basically nanochat LLM training core stripped down to a single-GPU, one file version of ~630 lines of code, then: - the human iterates on the prompt (.md) - the AI agent iterates on the training code (.py) The goal is to engineer your agents to make the fastest research progress indefinitely and without any of your own involvement. In the image, every dot is a complete LLM training run that lasts exactly 5 minutes. The agent works in an autonomous loop on a git feature branch and accumulates git commits to the training script as it finds better settings (of lower validation loss by the end) of the neural network architecture, the optimizer, all the hyperparameters, etc. You can imagine comparing the research progress of different prompts, different agents, etc. github.com/karpathy/autor… Part code, part sci-fi, and a pinch of psychosis :)


Opus 4.6 is smart enough to play tic tac toe on this whiteboard with me entirely by making API calls to the app's client API, yet dumb enough to lose at tic tac toe.




I find the failure cases fascinating too. > You control a hand trying to fill up a glass of water from a pouring tap











