Vibe Coding
Pattern: Willison Reframes the Core Agent Skill as Instruct-Then-Verify, Not Line-by-Line Review
In a note posted 22 August 2026, Simon Willison argues the key skill for productive coding-agent use is confidently instructing an agent how to make a change and then confidently verifying the change was applied correctly, and that reviewing every line is only one way to reach that second goal. His sharper claim: eyeballing every line has never been the most effective way to validate a change to a piece of software. Practically this pushes effort toward building verification that does not scale with diff size, tests, invariants, and reproductions, which matters because agent diffs are growing faster than review capacity.
↳ Follow the thread