Its funny how much the whole "strawberry" thing, which turned out to be o1-preview & Reasoners, was dismissed as overhyped at launch when it is clear in retrospect that it was way underhyped. A direct line from models unable to do basic math to solving unresolved math problems in 18 months.

If you've been trying to figure out DSPy - the automatic prompt optimization system - this talk by @dbreunig.bsky.social is the clearest explanation I've seen yet, with a very useful real-world case study www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Zt... My notes here: simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/4/d...

Someone posted a real Monet painting but claimed it was AI generated The comments look like a typical bluesky conversation

Most people, given a magic wand, would not wish for the ability to write software. They'd wish for their sofware to work properly without them having to do fuck-all. www.joanwestenberg.com/ai-twitters...

Incredible interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziqs...

3 Seductive Traps in Agent Building by Ara Khan In building AI agents at Cline, they've discovered that the most dangerous ideas aren't the obviously bad ones, they're the seductive ones that sound brilliant in theory but fail in practice. cline.bot/blog/3-seduc...

Microsoft made a useful LLM copilot tool that could summarize text in spreadsheets. They provided clear instructions about how to use it and not to use it. In response, journalists are now mocking them for doing exactly the right thing and showing how to use and not use the tools.

The positive thing about AI tooling going mainstream and setting expectations high (e.g. "anyone can build software with AI") is that a large group will learn what us devs know already: Creating good software is hard and it's hard to explain to outsiders in a way they understand

All AI-powered code editors, maybe except Github Copilot.

A lot of content is made by extremely online people, who observe the behavior of other extremely online people and assume that's how everyone is. It's very easy to let your worldview be shaped by a small number of people who are very good at getting attention on phones

Video version of my blog from yesterday: A taxonomy for next-generation reasoning models. Skills, calibration, abstraction, strategy (last two are "planning"). Presenting an improved version later today at AI Engineer World's Fair Watch here: buff.ly/b4cvyFw

what if you could model a problem in a spreadsheet, and then instantly start applying powerful *filters* to explore your space of options? that's the idea @alexwarth.bsky.social and I have been exploring recently at @inkandswitch.com ... 1/

Last week was autism awareness day. I planned on publishing this article then, but I'm still recovering from a burnout. I finished it today and hit the publish button. If you're interested, it's a deeply personal reflection on the year following my diagnosis.

In a system that rewards daily noise, we crave what survives our absence. Heavy things take time. And here, time is taxed. If you’re feeling the tension between speed and substance, this one's for you: www.workingtheorys.com/p/make-somet...

“We chronically overvalue technical solutions and undervalue psychological ones.” Builders chase what’s easy to measure. But what moves people is often intangible: status, belonging, instincts we feel but rarely name. If you optimized for perceived value, what would you build? shorturl.at/COPZP

“Teach people conceptual models that evolve over generations of builders” This line from @davidhoang.com hit hard He asks: What if we evolved how we conceptualize version control before defaulting to Git? That shift could unlock new ways to build software: www.proofofconcept.pub/p/too-legit-...

This is a really neat Python library providing decorator and docstring and type signature based syntactic sugar over my LLM package - I blogged about here: simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/3/s...