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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.

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