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Public story · 2026-03-02 · source-backed
Simon Willison launched a multi-chapter guide collecting practical patterns for working with coding agents. Chapters include "Writing code is cheap now," "First run the tests," "Red/green TDD," "Hoard things you know how to do," and the new "Interactive Explanations" chapter fighting cognitive debt. A rare living document that's becoming the definitive practitioner reference. simonwillison.net
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simonwillison.net — Willison has been publishing 5-8 posts per day for the last week, and is now consolidating into a structured guide. Two chapters published: "Writing code is cheap now" explores the economic implications when implementation approaches zero marginal cost — th...
The fourth chapter of Willison's Agentic Engineering Patterns guide addresses cognitive debt by having agents build interactive animated explanations of their own code. Martin Fowler endorsed the full guide. The methodology is now four chapters: (1) code is cheap, (2) red/gree...
Willison shipped datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 on June 7, letting agents perform structured data edits inside Datasette, alongside micropython-wasm sandbox work for running untrusted agent code. Separately his evolving Agentic Engineering Patterns guide reframes the work around t...
Simon Willison released the first two chapters of a living guide to Agentic Engineering Patterns. Chapter 1: "Writing code is cheap now." Chapter 2: "Use red/green TDD" -- the "four-word prompt that unlocks substantial engineering discipline." Martin Fowler linked to it within...
Willison's guide is the closest thing to a consensus playbook for working with coding agents. Two chapters published: "Writing code is cheap now" (the economics shift) and "Red/green TDD" (the methodology). Combined with the Ladybird Rust port case study (25K lines of Rust in...
— "The defining characteristic of a coding agent is that it can execute the code it writes." Never assume LLM-generated code works without verification. Patterns for python -c edge case testing, /tmp demo files, browser automation with Playwright/Rodney. Red/green TDD: when ag...
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