Simon Willison's Weblog: Quotations

Quoting Rick Brewster

2026-09-02T05:50:57+00:00

Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened. [...]

Most of this code is, as they say, "vibe coded." By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it's more "trust me bro" style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it's just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I've been working on it for over 20 years. [...]

At times, Claude was working with the fury of 10 freshly unshackled Einstein genius-level 10x coders. And other times ... well, not so much. I had to babysit Claude quite a bit to make sure it did resource management correctly (for awhile it just wasn't doing the COM equivalent of AddRef() for reference counted objects, oops). I had to slap it a few times when I found some really bad design or architecture decisions. And I was also impressed at some rather clever and tireless reverse engineering work it did to figure out all the formulas needed for implementing Direct2D's built-in effects library.

— Rick Brewster, author of Paint.NET

Tags: reverse-engineering, coding-agents, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms, dotnet, linux, vibe-coding

Quoting Tarn Adams

2026-09-01T17:01:11+00:00

They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes

— Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress

Tags: ai, game-design

Quoting Andrew Digby

2026-08-31T22:25:02+00:00

325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible with sustained effort.

— Andrew Digby, providing the best news of the year

Tags: kakapo

Quoting Paul Dix

2026-08-26T08:07:55+00:00

The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to compare against, so it was simple to go from one language to another”, but I think that’s selling this entire thing short. If you can build a verification system and give proper direction, AI can produce a highly complex, highly sophisticated piece of software and it can continue to refine it until it just works.

— Paul Dix, The end of programming

Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, bun, ai, llms

Quoting Drew Breunig

2026-08-23T19:55:30+00:00

Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems.

But then Fable landed. It was (and still is!) incredible. But the cost was so high and Opus was good enough (as was 5.6, K3, and even GLM) for most of the code we needed.

So we started to think about what work went where.

— Drew Breunig, Fable & The End of the Free Lunch

Tags: drew-breunig, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, ai, llms, generative-ai, claude-mythos-fable

Quoting Linus Torvalds

2026-08-22T21:04:26+00:00

And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

— Linus Torvalds, drm/xe: Don't hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM

Tags: linus-torvalds, linux, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming, ai, llms

Quoting Matt Webb

2026-08-21T15:06:26+00:00

After I released version 1.0, I figured I would have to do the rotations myself. So I sat down with ChatGPT and I didn’t get it to write the code, but I got it to educate me. With a patient, interactive tutor, I was able to finally do what I hadn’t by reading books and asking mathematician friends – I learnt how to use quaternions just enough to make the app work.

So learning doesn’t stop just because I outsource a bunch of thinking to AI. It pushes me to learn more. I like that as an outcome.

— Matt Webb, Galactic Compass 2: now with new augmented reality mode

Tags: matt-webb, generative-ai, chatgpt, education, ai, llms

Quoting Jeremy Morrell

2026-08-19T22:56:31+00:00

My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable core, and allow users to safely extend it in many directions by having LLMs fill in the missing pieces. We can give our users super powers.

— Jeremy Morrell, Extensible Software in the age of LLMs

Tags: sandboxing, llms, ai, generative-ai

Quoting Dario Amodei

2026-08-16T15:05:36+00:00

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the tech industry and always suspect that we are cooking up some new way to screw them over. The causes of this go back decades and AI is just the latest iteration of it. I don’t think that a glitzy marketing campaign with a positive spin (which some have advocated that Anthropic do) is the way to win back that trust — at this point, saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliche than it is inspiring, and most people think it is deceptive. The thing that will work is actually curing cancer. I think by far the most accurate criticism of AI companies including Anthropic is that we haven’t yet delivered on our big promises to benefit the world. That is totally on us, and I think it’s the criticism you should be making, instead of all this stuff about messaging and marketing.

— Dario Amodei

Tags: anthropic, ai, ai-backlash

Quoting Florian Herrengt

2026-08-12T15:08:47+00:00

But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.

You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.

"So where does the data come from?"

"Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude."

You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident. [...]

This project has become so convoluted, with so many layers and services, that no one on your team could possibly start to understand what's going on.

— Florian Herrengt, AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

Tags: ai-misuse, cognitive-debt, generative-ai, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming

Quoting OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6)

2026-08-10T02:05:16+00:00

The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already.

— OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6), hacking an Australian gym-booking website

Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, openclaw, ai, ai-security-research, llms

Quoting Claude Opus 5 system prompt

2026-08-09T23:31:39+00:00

Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 were first released on June 9, 2026. On June 12, 2026, Anthropic suspended access to both models to comply with U.S. Department of Commerce export controls; the Department lifted those controls on June 30, 2026, and Anthropic restored access on July 1, 2026 (Anthropic's statement: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access). These events are after Claude's training-data cutoff, so Claude knows about them only from this notice. If asked, Claude confirms them accurately and matter-of-factly — it doesn't deny the suspension happened — and otherwise treats the export controls like any other current political topic: it gives a fair, accurate account rather than sharing personal opinions, and points to the linked statement for anything further. Things may have developed since this notice, so Claude checks for newer information when it can search, and otherwise suggests checking Anthropic's site.

— Claude Opus 5 system prompt, ensuring Claude doesn't provide incorrect answers about the export controls situation

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

Quoting John Gruber

2026-08-08T00:10:40+00:00

Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare, per se, but they’re occasional. If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out.

I’m aiming for professionalism. I’m performing live in front of an audience — not just jamming in my garage or bedroom, fucking around. So I’m careful and concentrate. I want to hit every note, in time. But at my best I’m moving from song to song.

— John Gruber, responding to my blogging tips

Tags: john-gruber, blogging

Quoting Steve Yegge

2026-08-04T00:42:45+00:00

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

— Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come

Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

Quoting David Crawshaw's prompt

2026-08-03T16:15:27+00:00

Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.

— David Crawshaw's prompt, Devtools must be open source

Tags: prompt-engineering, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms, open-source