Talking Postgres with Claire Giordano | How AI is changing software development with Simon Willison
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What’s your gold standard for deciding whether AI-written code is ready for production? In Episode 42 of Talking Postgres, Simon Willison—creator of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and prolific open-source developer—joins Claire to share how AI is changing the way he builds software today. We dig into why his test for shipping AI-generated code is “Could I explain this to somebody else?”, how engineering management skills can be surprisingly useful when managing AI agents, and how the bottleneck is no longer writing code but understanding it. Also: personal credibility, deep research, the Winchester Mystery House, slop proxies, and Simon’s observation that “Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all.”
Previously on Talking Postgres:<br>Talking Postgres podcast Ep 30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison<br>Links mentioned in this episode:<br>Blog: Simon Willison’s Blog<br>Project page: Datasette, for finding stories in data<br>GitHub repo: sqlite-utils<br>Blog post: Release of alchemy-utils 0.1a0 (featuring Postgres & DuckDB)<br>Blog post: There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text, by Sophie Alpert<br>Podcast episode: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison, on Oxide and Friends<br>Podcast episode: An AI state of the union, on Lenny’s Podcast<br>Wikipedia: Winchester Mystery House<br>Idea in Mythical Man-Month: Conceptual integrity<br>Blog post: SQLite compressed text-history prototypes, by Simon Willison<br>Tools: Simon’s miscellaneous tools repo<br>In this episode, we covered:
00:00 Intro & music<br>04:00 A week of work before breakfast<br>09:12 Red-green TDD makes agents exercise every line<br>14:42 A million lines mean nothing if you don’t understand it<br>18:28 Finding low-hanging fruit among open PRs & issues<br>22:07 Getting work done while walking the dog<br>23:01 Gold standard: “Could I explain this to somebody else?”<br>28:27 Slop proxies add no value at all<br>30:49 Aggressive nitpicking reviews<br>35:01 Everything in software engineering is about trade-offs<br>41:16 Racoon heist game is only fun for 1 minute 15 seconds<br>43:46 New Year’s resolution to be more ambitious<br>48:11 You have to learn to throw things away<br>51:57 Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all<br>1:00:45 Engineering management skills are so useful<br>1:04:44 QA specialists should be having a great time<br>1:07:53 Writing is thinking, don’t outsource it<br>1:08:23 Skill atrophy is a choice you make<br>1:10:07 I believe in people who are motivated<br>1:11:55 Systems are not set up to deal with this volume<br>1:18:48 Research agents stopped being absolute garbage<br>1:21:49 The whole point of the “human in the loop”<br>1:26:10 Dream: I want there to be more small businesses
Creators and Guests
Host
Claire Giordano
Head of open source community efforts for Postgres at Microsoft. Ex-Citus Data, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and Brown University CS. Serves on PGCA board. Prolific Postgres conference speaker. Co-creator of POSETTE: An Event for Postgres. Loves sailing in Greece.
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Aaron Wislang
Open Source Engineering + Developer Relations at Microsoft + Azure ☁️ | Go (golang), Cloud Native, Linux 🐧 🐍 🦀 ☕ 🍷📷 🎹 | Toronto 🇨🇦🌎 | 💨😷💉 | https://aaronw.dev/hello/
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Simon Willison
Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/
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