Episode

An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point & dark factories are coming

Simon Willison, co-creator of Django and a prominent chronicler of AI-assisted software engineering, argues 2025's coding models crossed an inflection point in November where agents reliably do what they're told, enabling 'dark factory' style development where code is written and reviewed almost entirely by agents. He shares agentic engineering practices like test-driven development and reusable prototype archives, and explains why prompt injection's 'lethal trifecta' of private data, untrusted input, and exfiltration paths remains unsolved and dangerous.