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Simon Willison

What Simon Willison thinks about software quality

@simon-willison · 29 positions · 0 changes of mind

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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3 dated positions, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Simon Willison has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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  1. Our readingA passing test suite is not evidence that the software works, so an agent must also be made to start the thing and exercise it the way a person would.

    Their wordsjust cuz the test suite passes doesn't mean that the web server will boot. You know, there's there's always a chance that when you actually try in the real world, something's not going to work.

    ↗Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summityoutube.com 5th of 18 in this recording

    Interesting

  3. Our readingA language-agnostic conformance suite is the most powerful thing you can hand a coding agent, because the whole instruction becomes: write code until these tests pass.

    Their wordsAnd what you can do if you've got one of these conformance suites is you can give it to a a good agent and say, "Write code until this test suite passes." And it kind of will.

    ↗Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summityoutube.com 6th of 18 in this recording

    Interesting

  5. Our readingWhether agent-written code needs to be good depends entirely on how long it will live: a throwaway single-page tool can be spaghetti, anything maintained cannot.

    Their wordsAnything that you're maintaining over the longer term, the code quality does start really really mattering.

    ↗Simon Willison: Engineering practices that make coding agents work - The Pragmatic Summityoutube.com 7th of 18 in this recording

    Interesting