Lenny’s Podcast142 min
An AI state of the union: We’ve passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines
Simon Willison · Apr 2, 2026
Key learnings
- Coding agents crossed a reliability threshold around November 2025, so they now usually do what you ask, which changed how…
- Writing code is now cheap, so the bottlenecks move to ideation, prototyping, testing, and process; build several quick prototypes…
- Use test-driven development with agents: have them write tests, run them, and watch them fail first (Red/Green TDD) to keep…