> How much time have you spent running a coding agent like Claude Code

I spent a month trying to get it to build ImGui apps in C++ and Python. I did ImGui because I wanted to try something that’s not totally mainstream. I cancelled before the second month.

It would essentially get stuck over and over and could never get itself out of the mud. In every case I had to either figure out what was wrong and explain it, or fix the code myself, which was mentally taxing after it makes a batch of changes and, because I don’t trust it, I have to sort of re-validate-from-scratch every time I need to dig it out of the mud.

In the end it wasn’t faster, and definitely wasn’t producing better quality. And I’m not particularly fast.

The best analogy I can come up with is it’s like the difference between building a SpaceX rocket, and making a cake that looks like a rocket. You probably think that’s absurd, no one would try to use a cake that looks like a rocket. But it’s a really good cake. It blows smoke and has a system of hydraulics and catapults that make it look like it’s taking off. And the current situation is, people look at the cake rocket and think, “it’s not perfect but it’s basically 70% there and we will figure out the rest before long”. Except you won’t. It’s a cake.

And then we point to the documentation, and tests it built as evidence it’s not cake. But those are cake too.

So then the question is, if you live in a simulation made of cake but it’s indistinguishable from reality, does it matter?

Ouch, sounds like its C++/ImGui abilities aren't up to snuff yet.

I tend to use it for Python, JavaScript and Go which are extremely well represented in its training data. I don't know enough C++ myself to have tried anything with that language yet! Sounds like I'd be dissapointed.

Why would you want to run one in auto approve mode?

Because it is massively more productive than when you have to manually approve what it's doing. You can literally leave it running for an hour and come back to a fully baked solution (or an unholy mess depending on how the dice rolls go).

I gave a talk about this earlier this week, slides and notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/living-dangerously-wit... - also discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45668118

You don't care.

And OK, I get that my persistence in trying to help people understand this stuff can be annoying to people who have already decided that there's nothing here.

But in this case we have someone who looks like they are still operating on a 2024 model of how this stuff can be useful.

The "coding agents" category really does change things in very material ways. It only kicked off in February this year (when Claude Code released) and if you haven't yet had the "aha" moment it's easy to miss why it makes such a difference.

I'm not going to apologize for trying to help people understand why this matters. Give how much of a boost I'm getting from this stuff in my own work I honestly think it would be unethical for me not to share what I'm learning.