Simon Willison's Weblog: Quotations

Quoting Kimi K3

2026-07-17T13:43:53+00:00

Is there something I can actually help you with today?

— Kimi K3, after refusing to leak its system prompt

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-personality, kimi

Quoting Thibault Sottiaux

2026-07-16T17:45:59+00:00

On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files.

What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when:

Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled

The model attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory.

The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.

— Thibault Sottiaux, describing a pretty gnarly Codex bug

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, codex

Quoting Linus Torvalds

2026-07-16T13:26:10+00:00

I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

— Linus Torvalds, Linux Media Mailing List

Tags: linus-torvalds, linux, open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms

Quoting GitHub Changelog

2026-07-14T22:43:35+00:00

Dependabot now waits until a new release has been available on its registry for at least three days before opening a version update pull request. This cooldown is now the default and requires no configuration.

— GitHub Changelog, embracing dependency cooldowns

Tags: github, packaging, security, dependency-cooldowns

Quoting Armin Ronacher

2026-07-14T18:04:23+00:00

The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in one place. It lives partly in documentation and code, but also in code review, conversations, arguments, and the experience of having to explain a change to somebody else.

Before agents, some of this shared understanding was maintained by friction. If I wanted to change your storage layer, I usually had to read your code, ask you questions, and perhaps coordinate with another team whose service depended on it. This was slow, and much of that slowness was waste but not all of it was. Some of it was the process by which your understanding became mine, and by which both of us discovered whether we still agreed about how the system worked. This friction synchronizes people.

— Armin Ronacher, The Tower Keeps Rising

Tags: armin-ronacher, software-engineering, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents, agentic-engineering

Quoting Nilay Patel

2026-07-10T17:05:26+00:00

The reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it.

There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of a glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time.

You have to send that data to a cloud. You gotta do it. [...] Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Those are the current choices in this world.

And it means if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy.

And maybe you shouldn't. Like, there's an incredible argument for, nope, you shouldn't do that. Nope, the trade-offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it.

— Nilay Patel, The Vergecast

Tags: augmented-reality, privacy, ai, nilay-patel, ai-ethics

Quoting OpenAI

2026-07-10T01:05:57+00:00

[...] Work on web and mobile runs in the cloud. Work in the desktop app can also use local files and desktop apps with your permission. At launch, cloud Work conversations do not appear in desktop Work; desktop Work threads and local files remain on that computer.

— OpenAI, trying (unsuccessfully) to clarify ChatGPT Work

Tags: ai, openai, chatgpt

Quoting Kenton Varda

2026-07-08T20:03:34+00:00

I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team.

AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be seen by looking at the code, but omitting the higher-level framing needed to understand broadly what the code is doing.

— Kenton Varda

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, kenton-varda

Quoting Josh W. Comeau

2026-07-03T21:25:52+00:00

I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch.

It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year.

There are likely a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest is AI. There’s sort of a double whammy with AI:

Many people are wondering whether developer jobs will even exist in a few months, so they’re reluctant to spend time/money learning new dev skills.

Even if they do want to learn new dev skills, LLMs can provide personalized tutoring, so there’s less incentive to buy a paid course.

[...] I’ve spoken to a few course creators now, and we’re all seeing the same trend. Revenue down 50%+. Fewer people engaging with our content. People switching to LLMs, which slurp up all of our work and regurgitate it, without consent or compensation.

— Josh W. Comeau, via Salma Alam-Naylor

Tags: careers, ai, generative-ai, llms, josh-comeau, ai-ethics

Quoting Anthropic

2026-06-30T23:58:15+00:00

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

— Anthropic, on Twitter

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, claude-mythos-fable

Quoting Jon Udell

2026-06-28T21:57:41+00:00

~~Human~~ Agent in the loop

I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. [...]

Let’s do agentic software development like that. Not as a loop we’ve been excluded from, instead as one we invite agents into.

— Jon Udell, “Doctor, it hurts when agents create unreviewable PRs.” “Don’t do that.”

Tags: jon-udell, ai, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, agentic-engineering

Quoting Dean W. Ball

2026-06-26T22:25:46+00:00

This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics:

Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-release months that they are broadly available. After that period elapses, the models become sub-frontier, competition emerges, and margins compress. Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work.

The ongoing AI infrastructure buildout—the one that is, according to former US AI Czar David Sacks, essential to the US economy, assumes a functionally global total addressable market for US AI services. No one is building $100 billion dollar data centers to serve frontier models to whatever 100 companies the US government will allow access. [...]

— Dean W. Ball, 35 thoughts on what has happened and what America should do

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic

Quoting Timothy B. Lee

2026-06-26T21:15:09+00:00

This is like saying there's no learning curve to being a manager because your employees will just do whatever you tell them to do.

— Timothy B. Lee, on the idea that LLMs take no skill and have no learning curve

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms

Quoting OpenAI

2026-06-26T17:10:43+00:00

We're beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to GPT‑5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest cost. [...]

We believe in broad access, and we plan to make GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna generally available in the coming weeks. As part of our ongoing engagement with the U.S. government, we previewed our plans and the models’ capabilities ahead of today’s launch. At their request, we are starting with a limited preview for a small group of trusted partners whose participation has been shared with the government, before releasing more broadly. [...]

GPT‑5.6 is priced per 1M tokens across three model sizes: Sol is $5 input / $30 output; Terra is $2.50 input / $15 output; and Luna is $1 input / $6 output. GPT‑5.6 also introduces more predictable prompt caching, including support for explicit cache breakpoints and a 30-minute minimum cache life. For GPT‑5.6 and later models, cache writes are billed at 1.25x the model’s uncached input rate, while cache reads continue to receive the 90% cached-input discount.

— OpenAI, Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model

Tags: openai, generative-ai, llms, llm-pricing, llm-release, ai-security-research, gpt

Quoting Tom MacWright

2026-06-24T18:13:51+00:00

In the last few months, I've started to see [job applications] that were clearly cowritten by an LLM, link to an LLM-generated portfolio site, which then links to LLM-generated GitHub projects, with purely LLM-generated commit messages. [...]

My other reaction is that I don't know anything about these people.

They haven't put themselves out there. They haven't said anything true. [...]

The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools.

— Tom MacWright, Accidental anonymity

Tags: careers, ai, tom-macwright, ai-misuse