alt Hacker Newshttps://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/8/claude-datasette-plugin... October 2025
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/17/vibe-scraping/ July 2025
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/6/macos-app-built-entirel... July 2025
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/12/agentic-coding-recomme... June 2025
https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/23/honey-badger/ May 2025
And many more.
Not to mention that people have been using Cursor since way earlier than November 2025, with (self-reported, as always) success.
Can't wait for your Summer 2027 comment where you'll claim that coding agents really only became usable in November 2026.
Replies
Kiro • yesterday at 4:06 PM
Ridiculous. You're completely obsessed with him. It's embarrassing, and sad.
hehehehehehej • yesterday at 2:08 PM
He's not gonna respond to this lmao
I don't get it. What point do you think those make?
They read to me like an accurate report on the progress of these models and tools.
In May 2025 Claude Code could help me debug a WordPress installation.
In July 2025 I reported on someone managing to get it to build them a macOS app. I got that working for myself in February 2026 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/25/present/
Also in July 2025 I was successfully using one of the earliest async cloud environments - Codex Cloud - to scrape websites.
By October 2025 the most recent Claude could one-shot a simple Datasette plugin.
What changed in November 2025 was that the level of hand-holding needed to get good results dropped to the point that it was no longer credible to deny their utility.
> Can't wait for your Summer 2027 comment where you'll claim that coding agents really only became usable in November 2026.
Oh! I think I see what happened here. I said this:
> coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex) only started working really well in late November
"Working really well" and "only became usable" are not the same thing.