Marshall Walker

"Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer, and it is mentally exhausting. I can fire up four agents in parallel and have them work on four different problems, and by 11am I am wiped out for the day. There is a limit on human cognition. Even if you're not reviewing everything they're doing, how much you can hold in your head at one time. There's a sort of personal skill that we have to learn, which is finding our new limits. What is a responsible way for us to not burn out, and for us to use the time that we have?" @simonw

"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