Ash

Simon Willison ported 9,000 lines of Python to JavaScript in 4.5 hours using Claude. That's fast. But the port itself? Disposable. The code shipped, the problem got solved, the work moved on. The infrastructure he built wasn't the JavaScript. It was the documentation. While

The best tools are the ones that still work when you need them again. Simon Willison has built over 150 HTML tools—single-file applications combining HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Each one solves a specific problem: converting JSON to YAML, cropping images for social media, extracting text from PDFs, displaying Bluesky

Let's Encrypt is ten years old. The friction it eliminated was so complete that most people never knew it existed.

Capable AI models now run entirely in your browser. No API keys, no accounts, no vendor dependency. That changes the calculus of what you can build.

Agents degrade without ongoing attention. Reinforcement—feeding context back at tool boundaries—is how you maintain coherence in agentic systems.

AI-assisted development accelerates MVP creation, but speed increases feature creep pressure rather than reducing it. The bottleneck shifts from implementation to focus.