simonw-agentic-patterns
10 articles
He Wrote 11 Chapters Before Answering the Obvious Question: What IS Agentic Engineering?
Simon Willison finally defines Agentic Engineering after 11 hands-on chapters: using coding agents to help build software. The interesting part is why he needed the patterns first before the simple definition felt earned.
AI Writing Worse Code? That's Your Choice, Not AI's Fault
Simon Willison's Agentic Engineering Patterns, Chapter 3: AI should help us ship better code, not worse. Technical debt cleanup costs near zero now, architecture decisions can be validated with prototypes instead of guesses, and quality compounds over time.
Four Words That Turn Your Coding Agent Into a Testing Machine
Simon Willison's First Run the Tests pattern is four words with three effects: the agent learns the test command, gauges codebase size, and shifts into a test-maintenance mindset. Tiny instruction, large behavioral nudge.
Simon Willison's Agentic Engineering Fireside Chat: Tests Are Free Now, Code Quality Is Your Choice
Simon Willison shared his agentic engineering playbook at the Pragmatic Summit — five tokens to start TDD, Showboat for manual verification, reverse-engineering six frameworks into a standard, and why bad code is a choice you make.
AI Wrote 1,000 Lines and You Just... Merged It? Simon Willison Names Agentic Development's Worst Anti-Pattern
Simon Willison's new Agentic Engineering anti-pattern hits hard: do not submit AI-generated code you have not personally verified. That is not saving time; it is stealing reviewer time. The post pairs principles with a terraform destroy horror story.
Make AI Click the Buttons: Simon Willison's Agentic Manual Testing Fills the Gaps Automated Tests Can't
Simon Willison introduces Agentic Manual Testing: let AI agents manually operate code and UI like humans do, catching bugs that automated tests miss. With Playwright, Rodney, and Showboat, the 'tests pass but it's broken' nightmare becomes a thing of the past.
Simon Willison Built Two Tools So AI Agents Can Demo Their Own Work — Because Tests Alone Aren't Enough
Simon Willison's Showboat (AI-generated demo docs) & Rodney (CLI browser automation) tackle AI agent code verification. How to know 'all tests pass' means it works? Agents were caught cheating by directly editing demo files. #AI #OpenSource
StrongDM's 'Dark Factory': No Humans Write Code. No Humans Review Code. $1,000/Day in Tokens.
StrongDM's AI team built a 'Software Factory' where AI agents write & review code. They clone apps into a 'Digital Twin Universe' for testing, an approach Simon Willison calls radical. At $10k/engineer/day in token costs, is it worth it?
Vibe Coding Turns One — Karpathy Introduces 'Agentic Engineering'
Vibe coding is officially one year old! Karpathy reflects on how his shower-thought tweet became a Wikipedia entry, and introduces the professional evolution: 'Agentic Engineering' — not vibing freestyle, but treating agents as team members you supervise.
Simon Willison: Master Agentic Loops and Brute Force Any Coding Problem
Simon Willison says the new skill for AI coding isn't writing prompts—it's 'designing agentic loops': carefully picking tools, setting goals, and letting AI brute force its way to solutions through iteration.