Simon Willison
I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast! We talked about agentic engineering and all sorts of other LLM-related topics for 1h39m(!), plus a little bit about kākāpō parrots - here's my selection of highlights from our conversation https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/2/lennys-podcast/
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny’s Podcast

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation …

Simon Willison’s Weblog
Apr 2 at 8:43pmWeb
Show threadJohnApr 4
@simon Several very good lines in this.
Show threadPaul EverittApr 5
@buckfiftyseven @simon Agree, I took a LOT of notes, some really good thought directions.
Show threadJakub SynowiecApr 11

@simon Great episode! “The great misconception in AI is that using these tools effectively is easy” and “using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a software engineer” really resonated with me. It matches the sentiment of an essay I’ve been writing for some time and published today. Same experience! I think you'll like it.

https://jsynowiec.github.io/posts/ai-should-raise-the-bar/

AI Should Raise the Bar, Not Lower It

AI can speed up the right kind of work, but it also has a talent for scaling whatever standards you bring to it. Used well, it helps careful engineers move faster; used badly, it turns half-baked thinking into a much more efficient mess.

Jakub’s Musings