Developer Simon Willison released version 4.0rc2 of his open-source tool sqlite-utils. The code was mostly written by Claude Fable, an AI assistant. Willison paid approximately $149.25 for the AI's work. The release marks a significant milestone in AI-assisted software development.
This is the future of coding. Not replacement, but acceleration. An AI wrote production-quality code for a popular tool. Cost? Less than a dinner for two. The human still designed, reviewed, and shipped. But the grunt work? Automated.
We are witnessing the commoditization of code generation. The bottleneck shifts from typing to thinking. Developers become architects, not laborers. That $149 investment returned weeks of manual effort. This isn't a threat. It's an upgrade.