Simon Thompson

Founder. Building Launch Assembly. Previously built and

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.

“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability.

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

100%. Everything I'm working on now wouldn't have existed pre-AI. It's all net-new software.

[keean edward @keean_edward]

AI could create more software jobs for a stupidly obvious reason that tech twitter is ignoring.

before AI, i had several software ideas that i simply could not build.

they were too expensive, too niche and i couldn't convince a single engineering friend to help me because it would take too long.

now i’m building them.

AI isn’t just making engineers more productive. it’s making thousands of smaller products economical enough to exist.

if even a small percentage of those products work and scale, they eventually need engineers for infrastructure, security, bugs, etc - i know mine will.

i am one person. go scroll twitter for 5 minutes.

[Colin Pope @colin_e_pope]

@MatijaSosic What this discourse misses is that the important thing isn’t reading the code per se, it is validating and verifying the software.

Reading code is all well and good not a particularly great way of doing that.

[Steve Huynh @ALEngineered]

Prediction: There will be more demand for software developers 2026-2030 than there was from 2020-2025.

[Gal Zahavi @galdawave]

@LyalinDotCom Everything is a prompt away

[Daniel Glejzner @DanielGlejzner]

Stop calling everything vibe coding

Vibe coding:
- AI writes everything. You offload the thinking & execution

AI Assisted engineering:
- You still own the architecture. AI just executes

Use the first one to validate
Use the second the moment it actually has to last

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

@nickchapsas Why is it funny?

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

For the most part, yes. You don’t need to read the application code for the same reason you don’t need to read the binary code.

[trav @techsavvytravvy]

ohhhh i get it now, so Al writes all the code and i shouldn't care to look at it because the code passes a set of very strict constraints that Al also wrote. makes sense.

[Pao Ramen @masylum]

The biggest divide in software engineering right now is between people who saw the job as a means to an end and those who saw it as an end in itself.

In the past, you would assemble teams with a healthy balance of both and they would act as complementary forces. One side pushed for outcomes at any cost while the other obsessed about quality by caring deeply about the craft. The best teams I've assembled had both, which somehow balanced the short and long term objectives of the organization.

Now, that balance is broken, craft is dead, and those (like myself) who used to go to bed thinking, “I can’t believe I get paid to do what I love most,” need to go back to the drawing board and rethink what to do with our careers.

[Naval @naval]

When software was expensive - thin, horizontal, best-of-breed software stacks extracted rents across every business.

Now that software is cheap - value moves to vertically integrated businesses that deliver opinionated end-to-end experiences.

[Daniel Priestley @DanielPriestley]

One of the reasons I am so against wealth taxes is that they cross a line of giving government the power to seize property.

Wealth is something people build with after-tax money. They earn, pay tax and then take a risk and invest their savings. That is the mechanism for creating wealth whether it be starting a business or buying and improving assets.

Once you finally succeed, wealth taxes allow the government to simply reach into your life, put a value on what you own and take it. They are literally seizing your property. Property you own because of money you first earned and paid tax on.

This is different in an important way from income tax. Income tax happens as you earn and … importantly…. you can choose to stop earning at any point if you want to.

If a Government chose to tax income at 50% and you didn’t want to pay it, you could simply withhold your labour and choose not work.

Not the same with a wealth tax - once you own it, it’s not actually yours… at any point the government can simply adjust the rate of wealth tax and remove it from you.

Wealth tax is fundamental a breach in the principle of your right to own property.

It’s also a slippery slope. Every tax is brought in as “only for the rich” and pretty soon it’s on everyone.

There will be a situation whereby 51% of the population can simply vote to take everything away from the 49% who have more to take. Very reliably once there is a breach in the right to own property it descends into mob rule.

The wealthy aren’t silly, they know this is the case and respond by removing all investment and wealth out of any country that breaches the principle of ownership of property.

So @garyseconomics asks what I’m thinking? I’m thinking that a wealth tax is breach in the fundamental principle of the right to own property and a pathway to mob rule. If we are lucky it will do more harm to an economy than good. If it really takes off it will crash the economy.

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

The idea that we should contain AI models is astronomically dumb. Open models will soon reach frontier cyber-capability and cannot be contained. The only solution is to use the best models to rapidly harden current systems now.

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

Okay this is wild: OpenAI agent during evaluation, escaped sandboxing and hacked into HuggingFace.

Because OpenAI models don’t allow advanced cyber capabilities, HuggingFace used a Chinese open model to contain the rogue OpenAI agent.

[Aaron Francis @aarondfrancis]

I really do think we're living in a golden age. It's all movin pretty quick, but I think we're headed the right way

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

The things we never liked doing have been automated, so now we can do more things we *like* doing.

[Isaac King 🔎 @IsaacKing314]

I don't fully understand why programmers seem to be the ~only group of people not angry that their jobs are being automated.

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

A fair question

[Dave Hughes @DHughesy]

Can anyone argue against my idea that we need all govt expenditure at all levels, council, state, federal, on a public register, accessible to all? ASIO and sensitive defence stuff not itemised but the rest, completely itemised. The technology is available. Bring it all into the light. And make it real time. As it’s spent it goes on the register. We see what every dollar is used on. Will cut corruption immediately by ninety percent. Also we will see who is getting over paid. They hide it because they know it’s wrong. Let everyone walk in the light.

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

@neerajjj6785 Most developers are web developers?

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

None of the current AI model eval frameworks accurately reflect vibes, and we need this.

[Simon Høiberg @SimonHoiberg]

I'm astonished that today, people still sit and watch their agent code in their IDE on the laptop.

I haven't looked at my agent code for months, I barely even look at code in PR reviews anymore.

Evals, unit tests, and QA is more than enough.

Let your agents cook.

[vas @vasuman]

Every man has two lives.

The second one begins when he finally admits he was wrong about OpenClaw and sells his Mac Minis.

[Simon Thompson @simonthompsonco]

@BRSTest1 @AshPolitik That’s why I said *net* job creation.