{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano","title":"How AI is changing software development with Simon Willison","html":"<iframe width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless src=\"https://share.transistor.fm/e/fe88354c\"></iframe>","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":5442,"description":"What’s your gold standard for deciding whether AI-written code is ready for production? In Episode 42 of Talking Postgres, Simon Willison—creator of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and prolific open-source developer—joins Claire to share how AI is changing the way he builds software today. We dig into why his test for shipping AI-generated code is “Could I explain this to somebody else?”, how engineering management skills can be surprisingly useful when managing AI agents, and how the bottleneck is no longer writing code but understanding it. Also: personal credibility, deep research, the Winchester Mystery House, slop proxies, and Simon’s observation that “Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all.”\n\nPreviously on Talking Postgres:\nTalking Postgres podcast Ep 30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison \nLinks mentioned in this episode:\nBlog: Simon Willison’s Blog\nProject page: Datasette, for finding stories in data\nGitHub repo: sqlite-utils\nBlog post: Release of alchemy-utils 0.1a0 (featuring Postgres & DuckDB)\nBlog post: There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text, by Sophie Alpert\nPodcast episode: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison, on Oxide and Friends\nPodcast episode: An AI state of the union, on Lenny’s Podcast \nWikipedia: Winchester Mystery House\nIdea in Mythical Man-Month: Conceptual integrity\nBlog post: SQLite compressed text-history prototypes, by Simon Willison\nTools: Simon’s miscellaneous tools repo\nIn this episode, we covered:\n\n00:00 Intro & music\n04:00 A week of work before breakfast\n09:12 Red-green TDD makes agents exercise every line\n14:42 A million lines mean nothing if you don’t understand it\n18:28 Finding low-hanging fruit among open PRs & issues\n22:07 Getting work done while walking the dog\n23:01 Gold standard: “Could I explain this to somebody else?”\n28:27 Slop proxies add no value at all\n30:49 Aggressive nitpicking reviews\n35:01 Everything in software engineering is about trade-offs...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/96oK6oMtH0qfumCURmVA4Hg7enGdZ1swehO6BOYsd8w/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS84OWEw/YmE3ZDQ5MDI3NzA5/MTljZThlODg3N2Qy/M2M1YS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}