Fragments: September 29

Simon Willison: The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge This has been a constant impression I get from following Willison’s writing. While things like vibe coding get a lot of attention, the real strength of agentic engineering relies on more sophisticated techniques - and these are not easy to learn or execute. It’s a reason I’m wary of extrapolating my own dabblings into firm opinions about how to use the genie. ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ ❄ Harper Reed explored what turns agents into hackers by creating a breakaway agent It ran and ran attacking all the machines on the same subnet, and was very effective. It didn’t really get very far, but it exhausted a lot of options, and was pretty fun to watch. (Just a reminder that this was on my local network with local boxes - don’t do this on a hosted box. That would be very rude.) The interesting observation from this was that a core enabler for this was “unlimited tokens”. He usually doesn’t see agents trying to do stuff like this because there’s a limit on…

≈