Holly Jones

The power of suggestion

AI twitter's favourite lie: everyone wants to be a developer Twitter's latest consensus on inevitability: now that large language models can write code, everyone will become a software developer. People, you see, have problems, and software solves problems, and AI removes the barrier between people and software, therefore everyone will build their own software. It's a syllogism, after a fashion,

Most people, given a magic wand, would not wish for the ability to write software. They'd wish for their sofware to work properly without them having to do fuck-all.

www.joanwestenberg.com/ai-twitters...

YouTube video by 20VC with Harry Stebbings Surge CEO & Co-Founder, Edwin Chen: Scaling to $1BN+ in Revenue with NO Funding

Incredible interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziqs...

3 Seductive Traps in Agent Building - Cline Blog In building AI agents at Cline, we've discovered that the most dangerous ideas aren't the obviously bad ones, they're the seductive ones that sound brilliant in theory but fail in practice.

3 Seductive Traps in Agent Building by Ara Khan

In building AI agents at Cline, they've discovered that the most dangerous ideas aren't the obviously bad ones, they're the seductive ones that sound brilliant in theory but fail in practice.

cline.bot/blog/3-seduc...

Microsoft made a useful LLM copilot tool that could summarize text in spreadsheets. They provided clear instructions about how to use it and not to use it. In response, journalists are now mocking them for doing exactly the right thing and showing how to use and not use the tools.

The positive thing about AI tooling going mainstream and setting expectations high (e.g. "anyone can build software with AI") is that a large group will learn what us devs know already:

Creating good software is hard and it's hard to explain to outsiders in a way they understand

All AI-powered code editors, maybe except Github Copilot.

A lot of content is made by extremely online people, who observe the behavior of other extremely online people and assume that's how everyone is.

It's very easy to let your worldview be shaped by a small number of people who are very good at getting attention on phones

Current AI models are extremely skilled, which was seen as the step change in evaluation scores across the industry in the first half of 2025, but often fail... Traits of next generation reasoning models

Video version of my blog from yesterday: A taxonomy for next-generation reasoning models.

Skills, calibration, abstraction, strategy (last two are "planning").

Presenting an improved version later today at AI Engineer World's Fair
Watch here: buff.ly/b4cvyFw

what if you could model a problem in a spreadsheet, and then instantly start applying powerful *filters* to explore your space of options?

that's the idea @alexwarth.bsky.social and I have been exploring recently at @inkandswitch.com ... 1/

One year later: I wasn’t broken, I was Autistic. I was diagnosed autistic at 36. “Welcome to the club”, my psychologist said. She confirmed what I had loosely suspected for years. I’m…

Last week was autism awareness day. I planned on publishing this article then, but I'm still recovering from a burnout. I finished it today and hit the publish button. If you're interested, it's a deeply personal reflection on the year following my diagnosis.

Of course! Excited to keep learning from your work.

Make Something Heavy You're creating more than ever, but it weighs nothing.

In a system that rewards daily noise, we crave what survives our absence.

Heavy things take time. And here, time is taxed.

If you’re feeling the tension between speed and substance, this one's for you:

www.workingtheorys.com/p/make-somet...

This is incredible. Hats off to you on the creativity, my friend 😂

Perspective is everything The circumstances of our lives may matter less than how we see them, says Rory Sutherland. At TEDxAthens, he makes a compelling case for how reframing is the key to happiness.

“We chronically overvalue technical solutions and undervalue psychological ones.”

Builders chase what’s easy to measure. But what moves people is often intangible: status, belonging, instincts we feel but rarely name.

If you optimized for perceived value, what would you build?

shorturl.at/COPZP

Too legit to git Issue 238: Why vibe coders won't commit

“Teach people conceptual models that evolve over generations of builders”

This line from @davidhoang.com hit hard

He asks: What if we evolved how we conceptualize version control before defaulting to Git?

That shift could unlock new ways to build software: www.proofofconcept.pub/p/too-legit-...

This is a really neat Python library providing decorator and docstring and type signature based syntactic sugar over my LLM package - I blogged about here: simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/3/s...

This is the blind spot behind most product failures.

And AI will only magnify it.

That’s not a failure of execution.

That’s a failure of understanding.

Speed only helps if you’re headed in the right direction.

And you can’t iterate your way to success if you’re building on false assumptions about why people behave the way they do.

That fear assumes our obsession with speed and iteration produced reliable results.

But the numbers tell a different story…

42% of failed startups cited “no market need” as a reason—making it the #1 cause of failure.