Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Sunday, 24th May 2026

Sighting 9:21 AM – 9:31 AM — Harbor Seal, California Sea Lion, California Brown Pelican, in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, CA, US, CA
Harbor Seal
Harbor Seal
California Sea Lion
California Sea Lion
California Brown Pelican
California Brown Pelican

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the conclusions produced are more often than not inaccurate but always full of confidence. The result is complete guesswork on root causes, fake-minimal repros, suggested implementation strategies, analogies to adjacent but often the wrong code, and long lists of error classes that might or might not matter. [...]

So at least personally, I increasingly want issue reports to be condensed to what the human actually observed:

  1. I ran this command.
  2. I expected this to happen.
  3. This happened instead.
  4. Here is the exact error or log.

Armin Ronacher, on slop issues filed against Pi

# 6:46 pm / armin-ronacher, open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, slop, ai-ethics, github-issues, coding-agents, pi

Saturday, 23rd May 2026

2026 » May

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