gregorein

20 million developers used to be the gatekeepers to software. Wabi CEO Eugenia Kuyda on who gets to build now:  "The only people who could make software up until last year or so [were] just professional developers... Very few people in the world." "Even if you have a good idea, go ahead, find an engineer, find a co-founder, find a technical co-founder to build this. But you can't really otherwise build it... It requires a lot." "But now anyone can." "This is just wild." "Before  we had to spend months developing that, developing an app and figuring out some illustrations and sounds. Now you just write one prompt and it's there." @wabi CEO @ekuyda on @solofounders with @julianweisser

this thread is what mass cope from legacy devs looks like. i talked to @FastCompany about why @garrytan's "AI slop" is actually the future of software engineering. the mass code review. the line-by-line gatekeeping. the "craftsmanship" that was really just slow iteration disguised as rigor - that era is over. and the engineers who built their entire identity around it are panicking. @gregorein brags about burning 3 billion tokens last year while dunking on garry for flexing lines of code. i've burned 6.6 billion in the past three months on codex alone. by his own logic, i'm 8x as credible. see how silly that sounds? yes, he found real issues. yes, they got fixed. that's exactly the point. karpathy's autoresearch proved this already - AI agents can solve very complex problems just by operating inside feedback loops, iterating to optimize a loss function. this is what software engineering is now - gradient descent. ship, measure, self-correct, repeat. all by the agent itself. this is the new startup playbook. your job isn't to review every line before deploy. your job is to build systems where agents observe outcomes - mrr, analytics, error rates, user behavior - and self-improve. the engineer's role shifts from gatekeeper to building the machine that builds the machine. you could run this level of audit (using AI) on any production site and find the same issues - most just don't have a billionaire CEO attached for virality. mocking the people who adapted is easier than adapting. but the craft is evolving whether you like it or not.

"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

so... I audited Garry's website after he bragged about 37K LOC/day and a 72-day shipping streak. here's what 78,400 lines of AI slop code actually looks like in production. a single homepage load of garryslist.org downloads 6.42 MB across 169 requests. for a newsletter-blog-thingy. 1/9🧵