Simon Willison's discomfort: vibe coding and real engineering are merging

Simon Willison built his framework on a clean line. Vibe coding meant using AI output you do not understand, fine for personal tools and irresponsible for software other people rely on. Agentic engineering meant professionals using AI to build better systems faster while keeping their standards. His new post is uncomfortable because that line is dissolving in his own practice. As agents get reliable, he finds himself shipping their code to production without reading it, and feeling the guilt that goes with it.

His worry has a name from safety engineering: normalization of deviance. Every unreviewed deploy that works makes the next one feel safe, until one does not. He also notes the bottleneck has moved upstream, from writing code to design and specification, which restructures how the work is done. He stays optimistic that this rewards existing expertise rather than removing it, but he does not pretend the discomfort away. Read the full post on Simon Willison's blog.

Why it matters

If you ship software, this is a prompt to decide your review policy on purpose. "The agent is usually right" is exactly how normalization of deviance starts, so the useful move is to choose now which categories of change still require human review, before the habit chooses for you.