Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2 posts tagged “prototyping”

2025

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work. I got a couple of quotes in this NYTimes story about internal resistance to Amazon's policy to encourage employees to make use of more generative AI:

“It’s more fun to write code than to read code,” said Simon Willison, an A.I. fan who is a longtime programmer and blogger, channeling the objections of other programmers. “If you’re told you have to do a code review, it’s never a fun part of the job. When you’re working with these tools, it’s most of the job.” [...]

It took me about 15 years of my career before I got over my dislike of reading code written by other people. It's a difficult skill to develop! I'm not surprised that a lot of people dislike AI-assisted programming paradigm when the end result is less time writing, more time reading!

“If you’re a prototyper, this is a gift from heaven,” Mr. Willison said. “You can knock something out that illustrates the idea.”

Rapid prototyping has been a key skill of mine for a long time. I love being able to bring half-baked illustrative prototypes of ideas to a meeting - my experience is that the quality of conversation goes up by an order of magnitude as a result of having something concrete for people to talk about.

These days I can vibe code a prototype in single digit minutes.

# 28th May 2025, 4:41 am / ai-assisted-programming, careers, prototyping, ai, llms, ai-ethics, vibe-coding, generative-ai, amazon

2007

Protoscript (via) JavaScript tool designed for easy prototyping of JS interactions; powered by YUI and jQuery.

# 7th September 2007, 10:55 pm / jquery, yui, javascript, libraries, prototyping, protoscript, bill-scott