Claim◆Article · 37:53 — 39:23
The way to offset the sense of grief or loss from AI taking over software engineering work is to be more ambitious about what you build.
Thariq Shihipar argues that if you only try to do the same work you did before LLMs, automation feels like a loss, but raising your ambition — doing the bigger thing — turns that loss into opportunity. ✦ AI generated
Thariq Shihipar · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-21 · original ↗
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“How has the past year and a half changed the way you think about your own craft and the value that you add?”
On your point about loss: I think this is real. If you're only trying to do the same work you were doing before LLMs, and now it's a prompt, it is, I think, kind of a sad feeling. And the way you offset that is by being more ambitious. I think Jared is such a good example — he hand-wrote all of the Zig code in his Oakland apartment in about a year, barely left his house, and had so much fun doing that. Now I see him rewrite all of Bun into Rust and he's having so much fun doing that — it's so much more ambitious, and that's how he offsets it.
Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation
- ·只做LLM之前的同类工作,如今只需一条提示词
- ·这种落差确实令人沮丧
- ·失落源于目标和能力的不匹配
- ·用更高的抱负抵消失落感
- ·Jared先手写全部Zig代码,乐在其中
- ·随后又用Rust重写Bun,目标更宏大
- ·更大胆的目标把损失转化为机会
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extends → In a world where AI makes building things easy, taste — the judgment of what to build in the first place — becomes the scarce and valuable skill, which is why designers who have taste are hard to automate away.Adam Mosseri · Lenny's Podcastextends → Taste matters more, not less, in a world where AI makes building easy — the winners will be the ones who are clear-eyed about what AI is and isn't good at.Adam Mosseri · Lenny's Podcast