As I have regularly said, just helping us get busier with busy work

The deepdive is out: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/how-claude...

The most surprising thing about this is OpenAI would publish such a paper

Cyber attacks against major UK infrastructure certainly seem to me on the rise. Retailers, Jaguar Land Rover still shut down due to ongoing incident and now Airports. All in the last few months

I'm ready to accept a definition of "agent" that I think is widely-enough agreed upon to be useful, at least in the AI engineering space: An LLM agent runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal (I've been dismissing the term as hopelessly ambiguous for years) simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/18/...

Just heard about on BBC News - The NHS is rolling out the Cera AI tool, claiming savings of £1.5m a day by predicting falls and infections before they become emergencies. Great AI success story? Worth noting: almost certainly "classic" ML/predictive analytics on vitals data - not LLMs/GenAi

TIL: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (infamous essay) "Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion."

Getting heavily distracted by overthinking the concept and practicalities of conversational programming when I am supposed to be preparing for my son's birthday party

"It’s only alright to whinge about something if you’re going to help fix it" One of my favourite phrases from a past org Similar, from Facebook: "Nothing is someone else’s problem" If you see a problem, make it your responsibility to help fix it. Even if it's not part of your job Be that person

For all its hustle theatre and hype merchants, LinkedIn had one saving grace: no politics. That’s apparently gone now. For the life of me, I cannot understand why people would want to be airing their political opinions on their live online CV

Further to my post last week on when the AI bubble will burst: apart from the common mistake that coding is most of software dev, it's a well-researched and thoughtful piece on the scale of the boom, the risks of overinvestment, the lack (so far) of real productivity gains/wider economic impact

The paradox of holacracy: it promises leaderless self-management, yet most examples only work because a strong, charismatic leader is holding the centre. Without that gravity, the system rarely scales. True holacracies are vanishingly rare - most collapse back into some form of hierarchy

Having spoken to a few people (incl Simon Willison) the answer seems a firm yes. Most "replace a worker" type use cases are simply not possible - unless you’re fine leaving your car running with the keys in the ignition and hoping no one crashes it. (I've also updated my article based on feedback)

We should also acknowledge that for most AI startups that have not yet found product-market fit: they are racing agains the clock. Most probably have ~6 months (or less) to gain serious traction: else they will prob have to fold / sell It's much higher pressure than in the past.

It is always time for an XP revival (Apparently this article is trending on HackerNews)

Wrote up a bit more on this. Am I right/wrong?

I don’t think people yet fully appreciate how the “lethal trifecta” restricts agentic AI use cases. When private data access, untrusted inputs, and external actions converge, you create a structural vulnerability we don’t yet know how to contain. simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/...

Not sure this means they've completely dropped it, but at least watering down any expectations

We've been told we're on the cusp of the next industrial revolution for 70 years now. "Ah, but this time, it's different"

Thank you to @observeruk.bsky.social for this thoughtful review. “Berners-Lee is clear-eyed about the benefits and the dangers. This Is for Everyone contains some very sharp thinking about what we need to do now.” We must fight for the web we want. observer.co.uk/culture/book...

Snake eating tail: Google’s AI Overviews cites web pages written by AI, study says

Good article. I particularly like the bit that vibe coding is not a level of abstraction (you don't keep the prompts for a start) "It’s analogous to a developer throwing away their source code and committing compiled binaries to version control!" uptimelabs.io/you-vibe-it-...

"You could not tell looking at these charts when AI-assisted coding became widely adopted. The core premise is flawed. Nobody is shipping more than before." substack.com/home/post/p-...

🫠

What if most of the benefit from “successful” technology transformations didn’t come from the tech at all? What if the real value came from the organisational changes that just happened to ride along with it? 1/7 🧵

In a client's office. This doggo has absolutely made my day. Massive floof ball, does stand up human cuddles.

"We must have 100% test coverage"

🤯

Good article, largely saying similar to others but saying it well (better than I can)

I asked ChatGPT about common similarities between technologies that delivered on their promise (like the internet, cloud computing and smartphones) versus those that always seem just around the corner (self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, AI "superintelligence", nuclear fusion, quantum computing) 1/3

Good interview with Benedict Evans (long time tech commentator/analyst). Worth listening to someone who's lived through multiple tech waves (and talking about them in comparison) "GenAI as transformative as the iPhone, but not more than the iPhone" youtu.be/2NgdQf2GzJg?...

The question isn’t if there will be an AI bubble burst, but when - and how big. Every wave of significant new tech - no matter how “good” - has followed the same pattern, in part because of inflated expectations and a long lag before adoption delivers real impact (see Solow Paradox). 1/5

People with critical thinking skills may have noticed that the stuff that Elon uses to inflate the value of his companies is always something that doesn't exist, and that his companies do not have any actual ability to deliver. And when the market begins to smell bullshit, he switches to a new con.

You've not lived until you've been to a Polish wedding

Fully agree, also just needed to rent a car, everything controlled by an incomprehensible screen. Bring back buttons

Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters. 🧪 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Via @jasongorman.bsky.social

"But we don't really understand how human consciousness works, so how could we say LLMs couldn't become conscious?" Saying GenAI could become conscious is no better than saying we don’t know how life began, so maybe my toaster is alive.

A different study saying the opposite. I'm a bit sceptical of the timeliness (as ChatGPT4 barely released by late 2022) but they appear to have tried to account for wider (e.g. economic) factors. They also say is correlation, not causation. digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/wp-content/u...

Always worth listening to what @martinfowler.com has to say

We seem doomed to repeat the journey over and over again. History shows technology adoption in orgs only delivers when it's outcome-focused, when processes are simplified, and when decision-making is pushed closer to the front line...

I'm not sure I would say it's "brilliant" (it doesn't feel any better to me than 4o). Reasonably balanced and thoughtful article though.

Since the 1950s, each major wave of computing and digital technology has been heralded as the beginning of a "new industrial revolution" or "new age", yet the promised economy-wide productivity surge has rarely materialised. Certainly nothing like the industrial revolution.

What if, *what if* most of the benefit of technology transformation comes from. the organisational change that comes with it? The tech was just a catalyst for that change...

Still chugging down

I got the complaint in the horrific OpenAI self harm case the the NY Times reported today This is way way worse even than the NYT article makes it out to be OpenAI absolutely deserves to be run out of business