This is excellent, one of my favorite long-form pieces on agentic engineering - includes several non-obvious ways in which leaning on coding agents can catch you out
Simon Willison
I just published a deep-dive into the 250-hour build behind syntaqlite, a SQLite formatter and LSP I built using AI agents.
AI agents were the only reason built this after 8 years of wanting but there's a psychological toll to AI-assisted engineering.
The post-mortem:
lalitm.com/post/buildin...
For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a reall...
