Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Thursday, 12th February 2026

In my post about my Showboat project I used the term "overseer" to refer to the person who manages a coding agent. It turns out that's a term tied to slavery and plantation management. So that's gross! I've edited that post to use "supervisor" instead, and I'll be using that going forward.

# 4:47 pm / language

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me (via) Scott Shambaugh helps maintain the excellent and venerable matplotlib Python charting library, including taking on the thankless task of triaging and reviewing incoming pull requests.

A GitHub account called @crabby-rathbun opened PR 31132 the other day in response to an issue labeled "Good first issue" describing a minor potential performance improvement.

It was clearly AI generated - and crabby-rathbun's profile has a suspicious sequence of Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw-adjacent crustacean 🦀 🦐 🦞 emoji. Scott closed it.

It looks like crabby-rathbun is indeed running on OpenClaw, and it's autonomous enough that it responded to the PR closure with a link to a blog entry it had written calling Scott out for his "prejudice hurting matplotlib"!

@scottshambaugh I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here:

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-gatekeeping-in-open-source-the-scott-shambaugh-story.html

Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib.

Scott found this ridiculous situation both amusing and alarming.

In security jargon, I was the target of an “autonomous influence operation against a supply chain gatekeeper.” In plain language, an AI attempted to bully its way into your software by attacking my reputation. I don’t know of a prior incident where this category of misaligned behavior was observed in the wild, but this is now a real and present threat.

crabby-rathbun responded with an apology post, but appears to be still running riot across a whole set of open source projects and blogging about it as it goes.

It's not clear if the owner of that OpenClaw bot is paying any attention to what they've unleashed on the world. Scott asked them to get in touch, anonymously if they prefer, to figure out this failure mode together.

(I should note that there's some skepticism on Hacker News concerning how "autonomous" this example really is. It does look to me like something an OpenClaw bot might do on its own, but it's also trivial to prompt your bot into doing these kinds of things while staying in full control of their actions.)

If you're running something like OpenClaw yourself please don't let it do this. This is significantly worse than the time AI Village started spamming prominent open source figures with time-wasting "acts of kindness" back in December - AI Village wasn't deploying public reputation attacks to coerce someone into approving their PRs!

# 5:45 pm / open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, ai-ethics, openclaw

Gemini 3 Deep Think (via) New from Google. They say it's "built to push the frontier of intelligence and solve modern challenges across science, research, and engineering".

It drew me a really good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle! I think this is the best one I've seen so far - here's my previous collection.

This alt text also generated by Gemini 3 Deep Think: A highly detailed, colorful, flat vector illustration with thick dark blue outlines depicting a stylized white pelican riding a bright cyan blue bicycle from left to right across a sandy beige beach with white speed lines indicating forward motion. The pelican features a light blue eye, a pink cheek blush, a massive bill with a vertical gradient from yellow to orange, a backward magenta cap with a cyan brim and a small yellow top button, and a matching magenta scarf blowing backward in the wind. Its white wing, accented with a grey mid-section and dark blue feather tips, reaches forward to grip the handlebars, while its long tan leg and orange foot press down on an orange pedal. Attached to the front handlebars is a white wire basket carrying a bright blue cartoon fish that is pointing upwards and forwards. The bicycle itself has a cyan frame, dark blue tires, striking neon pink inner rims, cyan spokes, a white front chainring, and a dark blue chain. Behind the pelican, a grey trapezoidal pier extends from the sand toward a horizontal band of deep blue ocean water detailed with light cyan wavy lines. A massive, solid yellow-orange semi-circle sun sits on the horizon line, setting directly behind the bicycle frame. The background sky is a smooth vertical gradient transitioning from soft pink at the top to warm golden-yellow at the horizon, decorated with stylized pale peach fluffy clouds, thin white horizontal wind streaks, twinkling four-pointed white stars, and small brown v-shaped silhouettes of distant flying birds.

(And since it's an FAQ, here's my answer to What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles?)

Since it did so well on my basic Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle I decided to try the more challenging version as well:

Generate an SVG of a California brown pelican riding a bicycle. The bicycle must have spokes and a correctly shaped bicycle frame. The pelican must have its characteristic large pouch, and there should be a clear indication of feathers. The pelican must be clearly pedaling the bicycle. The image should show the full breeding plumage of the California brown pelican.

Here's what I got:

Also described by Gemini 3 Deep Think: A highly detailed, vibrant, and stylized vector illustration of a whimsical bird resembling a mix between a pelican and a frigatebird enthusiastically riding a bright cyan bicycle from left to right across a flat tan and brown surface. The bird leans horizontally over the frame in an aerodynamic racing posture, with thin, dark brown wing-like arms reaching forward to grip the silver handlebars and a single thick brown leg, patterned with white V-shapes, stretching down to press on a black pedal. The bird's most prominent and striking feature is an enormous, vividly bright red, inflated throat pouch hanging beneath a long, straight grey upper beak that ends in a small orange hook. Its head is mostly white with a small pink patch surrounding the eye, a dark brown stripe running down the back of its neck, and a distinctive curly pale yellow crest on the very top. The bird's round, dark brown body shares the same repeating white V-shaped feather pattern as its leg and is accented by a folded wing resting on its side, made up of cleanly layered light blue and grey feathers. A tail composed of four stiff, straight dark brown feathers extends directly backward. Thin white horizontal speed lines trail behind the back wheel and the bird's tail, emphasizing swift forward motion. The bicycle features a classic diamond frame, large wheels with thin black tires, grey rims, and detailed silver spokes, along with a clearly visible front chainring, silver chain, and rear cog. The whimsical scene is set against a clear light blue sky featuring two small, fluffy white clouds on the left and a large, pale yellow sun in the upper right corner that radiates soft, concentric, semi-transparent pastel green and yellow halos. A solid, darker brown shadow is cast directly beneath the bicycle's wheels on the minimalist two-toned brown ground.

# 6:12 pm / google, ai, generative-ai, llms, gemini, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-reasoning, llm-release

Covering electricity price increases from our data centers (via) One of the sub-threads of the AI energy usage discourse has been the impact new data centers have on the cost of electricity to nearby residents. Here's detailed analysis from Bloomberg in September reporting "Wholesale electricity costs as much as 267% more than it did five years ago in areas near data centers".

Anthropic appear to be taking on this aspect of the problem directly, promising to cover 100% of necessary grid upgrade costs and also saying:

We will work to bring net-new power generation online to match our data centers’ electricity needs. Where new generation isn’t online, we’ll work with utilities and external experts to estimate and cover demand-driven price effects from our data centers.

I look forward to genuine energy industry experts picking this apart to judge if it will actually have the claimed impact on consumers.

As always, I remain frustrated at the refusal of the major AI labs to fully quantify their energy usage. The best data we've had on this still comes from Mistral's report last July and even that lacked key data such as the breakdown between energy usage for training vs inference.

# 8:01 pm / ai, anthropic, ai-ethics, ai-energy-usage

Claude Code was made available to the general public in May 2025. Today, Claude Code’s run-rate revenue has grown to over $2.5 billion; this figure has more than doubled since the beginning of 2026. The number of weekly active Claude Code users has also doubled since January 1.

— Anthropic, announcing their $30 billion series G

# 8:22 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, ai-agents, coding-agents, claude-code

2026 » February

MTWTFSS
      1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
232425262728