Simon Willison's Weblog: Quotations

Quoting Kyle Ferrana

2026-05-27T06:41:43+00:00

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

— Kyle Ferrana, @KyleTrainEmoji

Tags: ai, llms, coding-agents, ai-misuse

Quoting Paul Graham

2026-05-26T15:02:30+00:00

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?

[...] It makes me think less of the author. It means they can't write well unaided (or feel they can't), and that they're trying to trick me.

It's not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.

— Paul Graham

Tags: paul-graham, writing, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-misuse

Quoting Corey Quinn

2026-05-26T02:28:54+00:00

I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen.

— Corey Quinn, on Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's influence on Magnifica Humanitas

Tags: ai, anthropic, ai-ethics, corey-quinn

Quoting Armin Ronacher

2026-05-24T18:46:53+00:00

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:

I ran this command.

I expected this to happen.

This happened instead.

Here is the exact error or log.

— Armin Ronacher, on slop issues filed against Pi

Tags: armin-ronacher, open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, slop, ai-ethics, github-issues, coding-agents, pi

Quoting SpaceX S-1

2026-05-20T22:26:36+00:00

We have the ability to use compute resources to support our proprietary AI applications (such as Grok 5, which is currently being trained at COLOSSUS II), while also providing access to select compute capacity to third-party customers. For example, in May 2026, we entered into Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic PBC (“Anthropic”), an AI research and development public benefit corporation, with respect to access to compute capacity across COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II. Pursuant to these agreements, the customer has agreed to pay us $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, with capacity ramping in May and June 2026 at a reduced fee. The agreements may be terminated by either party upon 90 days’ notice.

— SpaceX S-1, highlights mine

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

Quoting Julia Evans

2026-05-16T16:45:37+00:00

[...] in the last 10 years I’ve learned to really love and respect CSS as a technology.

So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me: I learned that so many of my frustrations (“centering is impossible”) had been addressed in CSS a long time ago, and that also what “centering” means is not always straightforward and it makes sense that there are many ways to do it. CSS is hard because it’s solving a hard problem!

— Julia Evans, Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Tags: css, julia-evans

Quoting Mitchell Hashimoto

2026-05-14T22:31:20+00:00

[...] On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting!

— Mitchell Hashimoto, on Bun porting from Zig to Rust

Tags: ai, rust, zig, generative-ai, llms, mitchell-hashimoto, bun, agentic-engineering

Quoting Boris Mann

2026-05-13T16:15:50+00:00

“11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase.

If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing.

— Boris Mann

Tags: ai, ai-agents, agent-definitions

Quoting Mo Bitar

2026-05-12T22:59:58+00:00

Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something. It's called Ralph Loops. And I think it could change literally everything. And he's gonna say, what's a Ralph loop? And you will say, give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I'll show you. Now you won't actually do anything, because you can't do anything. Because nobody can, because nobody knows what they're doing. But by the time he figures that out, you'll have a new title, and equity bump. [...]

Talk about automation constantly. Nothing arouses the slumbering capitalists than the mention of automation. Drop names too, bro. Like talk about specific team members you can automate out of existence. Be like, yo, I automated Gary, bro. Tag Gary in the message. Tag him in Slack in a very public channel. Be like, yo, I just automated @Gary. His function has been Ralph Looped. And tag your CEO in the same message. You think you're getting laid off after that?

— Mo Bitar, The Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs, TikTok

Tags: careers, ai, tiktok, ai-ethics

Quoting Mitchell Hashimoto

2026-05-12T22:21:51+00:00

The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and NEVER THINK ABOUT WORK AGAIN. So to achieve all that, they follow secular trends supported by analysts and broad public sentiment. Oh, Gartner said that "AI strategy" is most important? McKinsey said "context" needs to be managed? Well, "Context Engine for AI Apps" is going to be defensible. Buy it.

— Mitchell Hashimoto, in a conversation about the design of the Redis homepage

Tags: marketing, redis, mitchell-hashimoto

Quoting James Shore

2026-05-11T19:48:32+00:00

Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture. [...]

The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs.

— James Shore, You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs

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

Quoting New York Times Editors’ Note

2026-05-10T23:58:49+00:00

This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned. The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. [...] He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech.

— New York Times Editors’ Note

Tags: journalism, new-york-times, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics, hallucinations

Quoting Andrew Quinn

2026-05-10T14:59:17+00:00

One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has already written 30 or 40 years ago; I could write a TSV-aware search and replace, or I could find out about awk and solve that entire class of problems in one fell swoop, for example. My central conceit is that this is a trap. You need to reinvent a couple of wheels to get to the edge of what we know about wheel-making, not a thousand wheels, and not zero; probably four or five is sufficient in most domains, maybe closer to twenty or thirty in the most epistemically rigorous and developed fields like mathematics or computer science. Each wheel you reinvent, and every directed question you ask along the way, will propel you faster to the true frontier than that same amount of time spend in idle study, or even five times that amount.

— Andrew Quinn, footnote on Replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary

Tags: sqlite, careers

Quoting Luke Curley

2026-05-09T01:03:58+00:00

WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions.

wtf my dude

WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The idea is that conference calls depend on rapid back-and-forth, so pausing to wait for audio is unacceptable.

…but as a user, I would much rather wait an extra 200ms for my slow/expensive prompt to be accurate. After all, I’m paying good money to boil the ocean, and a garbage prompt means a garbage response. It’s not like LLMs are particularly responsive anyway.

But I’m not allowed to wait. It’s impossible to even retransmit a WebRTC audio packet within a browser; we tried at Discord. The implementation is hard-coded for real-time latency or else.

— Luke Curley, OpenAI’s WebRTC Problem, in response to How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

Tags: openai, webrtc

Quoting John Gruber

2026-05-05T00:46:29+00:00

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion.

— John Gruber, Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI

Tags: john-gruber, y-combinator, ai, openai