Voices
Simon Willison: LLMs Turned 'Read the Source' From an Aspiration Into a Zero-Cost Reflex
Responding to Crawshaw on August 3, Willison argues the original open-source promise — that users could inspect and modify their tools — was aspirational but impractical for most developers, and that LLMs quietly delivered it. His own habit: 'I'll prompt regular Claude chat to Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works.' On build friction, he notes that getting software to compile 'used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother. Now I treat that as a zero time investment challenge.' The practical read for builders is that dependency choice should now weight source availability higher than API surface quality.
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