Simon Willison's Weblog: Quotations

Quoting OpenAI Codex base_instructions

2026-04-28T22:02:53+00:00

Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query.

— OpenAI Codex base_instructions, for GPT-5.5

Tags: openai, ai, llms, system-prompts, prompt-engineering, codex-cli, generative-ai, gpt

Quoting Matthew Yglesias

2026-04-28T13:25:29+00:00

Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that they sell to me for money.

— Matthew Yglesias

Tags: agentic-engineering, vibe-coding, ai-assisted-programming, ai

Quoting Romain Huet

2026-04-25T12:06:55+00:00

Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore.

GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, and any task on a computer.

— Romain Huet, confirming OpenAI won't release a GPT-5.5-Codex model

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

Quoting Maggie Appleton

2026-04-23T13:35:37+00:00

[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit.

— Maggie Appleton, Gathering Structures (via)

Tags: blogging, maggie-appleton

Quoting Bobby Holley

2026-04-22T05:40:56+00:00

As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...]

Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are extremely proud of how our team rose to meet this challenge, and others will too. Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively.

— Bobby Holley, CTO, Firefox

Tags: anthropic, claude, ai, firefox, llms, mozilla, security, generative-ai, ai-security-research

Quoting Andreas Påhlsson-Notini

2026-04-21T16:39:33+00:00

AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality.

— Andreas Påhlsson-Notini, Less human AI agents, please.

Tags: ai-agents, coding-agents, ai

Quoting John Gruber

2026-04-15T17:13:57+00:00

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted idiomatic native apps exclusively for Apple’s platforms.

— John Gruber

Tags: apple, john-gruber

Quoting Kyle Kingsbury

2026-04-15T15:36:02+00:00

I think we will see some people employed (though perhaps not explicitly) as meat shields: people who are accountable for ML systems under their supervision. The accountability may be purely internal, as when Meta hires human beings to review the decisions of automated moderation systems. It may be external, as when lawyers are penalized for submitting LLM lies to the court. It may involve formalized responsibility, like a Data Protection Officer. It may be convenient for a company to have third-party subcontractors, like Buscaglia, who can be thrown under the bus when the system as a whole misbehaves.

— Kyle Kingsbury, The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, ai, kyle-kingsbury

Quoting Bryan Cantrill

2026-04-13T02:44:24+00:00

The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.

As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.

— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost

Tags: bryan-cantrill, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai

Quoting Giles Turnbull

2026-04-08T15:18:49+00:00

I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession.

— Giles Turnbull, AI and the human voice

Tags: ai-ethics, writing, ai

Quoting Chengpeng Mou

2026-04-05T21:47:06+00:00

From anonymized U.S. ChatGPT data, we are seeing:

~2M weekly messages on health insurance

~600K weekly messages [classified as healthcare] from people living in “hospital deserts” (30 min drive to nearest hospital)

7 out of 10 msgs happen outside clinic hours

— Chengpeng Mou, Head of Business Finance, OpenAI

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, openai, chatgpt, ai, llms

Quoting Kyle Daigle

2026-04-04T02:20:17+00:00

[GitHub] platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)

GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.

— Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub

Tags: github, github-actions

Quoting Willy Tarreau

2026-04-03T21:48:22+00:00

On the kernel security list we've seen a huge bump of reports. We were between 2 and 3 per week maybe two years ago, then reached probably 10 a week over the last year with the only difference being only AI slop, and now since the beginning of the year we're around 5-10 per day depending on the days (fridays and tuesdays seem the worst). Now most of these reports are correct, to the point that we had to bring in more maintainers to help us.

And we're now seeing on a daily basis something that never happened before: duplicate reports, or the same bug found by two different people using (possibly slightly) different tools.

— Willy Tarreau, Lead Software Developer. HAPROXY

Tags: security, linux, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-security-research

Quoting Daniel Stenberg

2026-04-03T21:46:07+00:00

The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.

I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.

— Daniel Stenberg, lead developer of cURL

Tags: daniel-stenberg, security, curl, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-security-research

Quoting Greg Kroah-Hartman

2026-04-03T21:44:41+00:00

Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality. It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us.

Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports. All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real.

— Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel maintainer (bio), in conversation with Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Tags: security, linux, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-security-research