A recurring concern I’ve seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise.

This was certainly the case a couple of years ago, when asking models for help with Python or JavaScript appeared to give much better results than questions about less widely used languages.

With the latest models (https://simonwillison.net/tags/november-2025-inflection/) running in good coding agent harnesses I’m not sure this continues to hold up.

I’m seeing excellent results with my brand new tools (https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/17/chartroom-and-datasette-showboat/) where I start by prompting “use uvx showboat –help / rodney –help / chartroom –help to learn about these tools” - the context length of these new models is long enough that they can consume quite a lot of documentation before they start working on a problem.

Drop a coding agent into any existing codebase that uses libraries and tools that are too private or too new to feature in the training data and my experience is that it works just fine - the agent will consult enough of the existing examples to understand patterns, then iterate and test its own output to fill in the gaps.

This is a surprising result. I thought coding agents would prove to be the ultimate embodiment of the Choose Boring Technology (https://boringtechnology.club) approach, but in practice they don’t seem to be affecting my technology choices in that way at all.

    Tags: ai (https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai), generative-ai (https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai), llms (https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms), ai-assisted-programming (https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming), boring-technology (https://simonwillison.net/tags/boring-technology), coding-agents (https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents), agentic-engineering (https://simonwillison.net/tags/agentic-engineering), november-2025-inflection (https://simonwillison.net/tags/november-2025-inflection)