AI Should Help Us Produce Better Code
Simon Willison, Monday, March 9th, 2026
Many developers worry that outsourcing their code to AI tools will result in a drop in quality, producing bad code that's churned out fast enough that decision makers are willing to overlook its flaws.
If adopting coding agents demonstrably reduces the quality of the code and features you are producing, you should address that problem directly: figure out which aspects of your process are hurting the quality of your output and fix them.
Shipping worse code with agents is a choice. We can choose to ship code that is better instead.
Avoiding taking on technical debt
I like to think about shipping better code in terms of technical debt. We take on technical debt as the result of trade-offs: doing things "the right way" would take too long, so we work within the time constraints we are under and cross our fingers that our project will survive long enough to pay down the debt later on.