Simon Willison: Coding agents require skilled operators

Without the skilled individual, the “agent” is useless. It may as well not exist.

This is such a great observation. There’s a negative connotation to “vibe coding” out there today and while I think how I developed my apps could be be described as “vibe coding,” I really don’t think that captures what I’m doing when I’m at work. In my case, and in the case of most others coding with AI agents, I am very interested in the code and work in it directly myself a good amount. I’m using Cursor to generate most of the code for me, but I know how my project is structured, what key functions make everything work, and I make edits where it makes sense for me to just do it myself. I don’t just forget about the code and flow with the vibes, I’m actively developing a piece of software.

What AI coding agents help me with is reducing the time it takes to figure out how to do whatever I want to do. Instead of typing along search into Google and hoping a relevant Stack Overflow response appears in the results, I type that same query into Cursor and Cursor generates the code that works for my app. That code is almost never exactly what I want on the first try, so I will iterate on it either with further prompts or by editing the code directly myself.

I’m a product manager and designer by trade, but I’ve done a good amount of dev work over the years, and this feels very much like dev work has always felt to me, just at a higher pace.

On a related note, I appreciated this video from Sara Dietschy, which documented her vibe coding adventure of trying to turn her idea for a website into a reality. Basically, going from zero to something pretty good is easy, but lots of complexity comes from getting over the hump from "pretty good prototype" to "shipping product".