# How AI is changing software development with Simon Willison > Source: > Published: 2026-08-14 18:27:57+00:00 What’s your gold standard for deciding whether AI-written code is ready for production? In Episode 42 of Talking Postgres, [Simon Willison](https://simonwillison.net/)—creator of Datasette, co-creator of Django, and prolific open-source developer—joins [Claire](https://www.linkedin.com/in/claireg/) to share how AI is changing the way he builds software today. We dig into why his test for shipping AI-generated code is “Could I explain this to somebody else?”, how engineering management skills can be surprisingly useful when managing AI agents, and how the bottleneck is no longer writing code but understanding it. Also: personal credibility, deep research, the Winchester Mystery House, slop proxies, and Simon’s observation that “Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all.” **Previously on Talking Postgres:** **Links mentioned in this episode:** **In this episode, we covered:** 00:00 Intro & music 04:00 A week of work before breakfast 09:12 Red-green TDD makes agents exercise every line 14:42 A million lines mean nothing if you don’t understand it 18:28 Finding low-hanging fruit among open PRs & issues 22:07 Getting work done while walking the dog 23:01 Gold standard: “Could I explain this to somebody else?” 28:27 Slop proxies add no value at all 30:49 Aggressive nitpicking reviews 35:01 Everything in software engineering is about trade-offs 41:16 Racoon heist game is only fun for 1 minute 15 seconds 43:46 New Year’s resolution to be more ambitious 48:11 You have to learn to throw things away 51:57 Features are cheap. That doesn’t mean you should build them all 1:00:45 Engineering management skills are so useful 1:04:44 QA specialists should be having a great time 1:07:53 Writing is thinking, don’t outsource it 1:08:23 Skill atrophy is a choice you make 1:10:07 I believe in people who are motivated 1:11:55 Systems are not set up to deal with this volume 1:18:48 Research agents stopped being absolute garbage 1:21:49 The whole point of the “human in the loop” 1:26:10 Dream: I want there to be more small businesses