Simon Willison's account highlights a growing, yet often overlooked, use case for AI coding tools: the rapid research spike. The ability to quickly generate a functional prototype across multiple database backends demonstrates a shift from AI as a coding assistant to a speculative exploration engine. However, the alpha status of the resulting library underscores a critical gap—AI can initiate projects, but sustained development, community trust, and long-term maintenance still firmly reside in human hands.
This experiment matters less for the specific tool and more for its illustration of how developers might leverage AI to de-risk or accelerate initial feasibility studies, though the path from AI-generated prototype to production-ready code remains long and largely manual.