MechanismArticle
Getting software to compile in order to hack on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother, but now I treat building and checkout as a zero-time-investment challenge delegated to Codex or Claude Code.
The author contrasts the old compile-first friction with the new practice of telling Codex or Claude Code to checkout and build, returning later to see progress. ✦ AI generated
Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-08-03 · original ↗
Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother. Now I treat that as a zero time investment challenge: tell Codex or Claude Code to checkout and build X and then come back ten minutes later and see how it got on.
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In practice · 2
One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 80%LLMs have changed the equation in a way that makes the original open-source dream of examining and modifying code much more feasible.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 80%
Context · 2
Previously, the time-cost of writing code served as natural discipline that filtered out marginal ideas; coding agents remove that friction, making it far easier to justify features that would once have been dismissed as not worth the effort.Simon Willison · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 75%In practice, the freedom of open source mostly means leaning on other people to do the examining and modifying, because most people can't justify the time commitment to read and modify code themselves.Author (Hacker News comment) · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 70%