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:

• Talking Postgres podcast Ep 30: AI for data engineers with Simon Willison 

Links mentioned in this episode:

• Blog: Simon Willison’s Blog
• Project page: Datasette, for finding stories in data
• GitHub repo: sqlite-utils
• Blog post: Release of alchemy-utils 0.1a0 (featuring Postgres & DuckDB)
• Blog post: There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text, by Sophie Alpert
• Podcast episode: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison, on Oxide and Friends
• Podcast episode: An AI state of the union, on Lenny’s Podcast 
• Wikipedia: Winchester Mystery House
• Idea in Mythical Man-Month: Conceptual integrity
• Blog post: SQLite compressed text-history prototypes, by Simon Willison
• Tools: Simon’s miscellaneous tools repo

In this episode, we covered:

00:00 Intro & music

04:00 A week of work before breakfast

09:12 Red-green TDD makes agents exercise every line

14:42 A million lines mean nothing if you don’t understand it

18:28 Finding low-hanging fruit among open PRs & issues

22:07 Getting work done while walking the dog

23:01 Gold standard: “Could I explain this to somebody else?”

28:27 Slop proxies add no value at all

30:49 Aggressive nitpicking reviews

35:01 Everything in software engineering is about trade-offs

41:16 Racoon heist game is only fun for 1 minute 15 seconds

43:46 New Year’s resolution to be more ambitious

48:11 You have to learn to throw things away

51:57 Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all

1:00:45 Engineering management skills are so useful

1:04:44 QA specialists should be having a great time

1:07:53 Writing is thinking, don’t outsource it

1:08:23 Skill atrophy is a choice you make

1:10:07 I believe in people who are motivated

1:11:55 Systems are not set up to deal with this volume

1:18:48 Research agents stopped being absolute garbage

1:21:49 The whole point of the “human in the loop”

1:26:10 Dream: I want there to be more small businesses