Simon Willison: Matt Webb on Agentic Coding — 'Agents Grind Problems Into Dust' via While Loops and Token Burn
Simon Willison·medium signal
Simon Willison quotes Matt Webb's observation that the defining characteristic of agentic coding is persistence: give an agent a problem and a while loop and it will solve it by burning tokens, even if the solution path is inefficient. This framing recontextualizes the cost conversation — the question isn't whether agents can solve problems, but whether the token cost of grinding through iteration is worth the human time saved. Resonates with the builder community's lived experience.