antirez

Salvatore Sanfilippo (born 1977), known everywhere online as antirez, is the Sicilian programmer who created Redis in 2009 — the in-memory database that quietly powers caching, queues, and leaderboards across an enormous share of the modern web. He stepped back from maintaining Redis in 2020, then returned to the company in 2024, and his blog at antirez.com remains one of the most-read programmer blogs in the world.

Automatic programming, not vibe coding

Since 2024 much of that blog has chronicled his daily work with large language models. In “Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update)” he concluded that the highest-quality work comes from the human-plus-LLM combination, and in early 2026 he coined his own term for it: “automatic programming” — producing software that strictly follows the programmer’s vision, with AI assistance, as opposed to vibe coding where the human checks out of the process. He asks people to stop saying an LLM built their software for them: the vision, taste, and continuous steering are the human’s, so the result is too.

His advocacy is anything but starry-eyed. In May 2025 he published “Human coders are still better than LLMs,” arguing that human creativity keeps a real edge and that models remain far behind human intelligence — while noting in the same post that Gemini was “very useful” for checking his ideas, like a smart rubber duck. He is also firm that blog posts should distill human experience, discouraging AI-written prose even as he embraces AI-written code.

That combination — a systems programmer of rare pedigree who documents both what LLMs do well and where they fail — has made his posts recurring front-page fixtures on Hacker News and a reference point in the developer debate, alongside voices like Simon Willison.