It did it. Claude Opus 4.6 fixed a bug I've personally been trying to solve for 5 years. The bug itself dates back to 1998. Humans spent 25+ years trying to fix it. I spent hours, day after day, week after week, for 3 months, in a little NY cafe trying to solve this. Opus 4.6 solved it. omfg.

Thoughts on Steve Yegge's AI Vampire post: * omfg "Nap Attacks" are real. I hadn't connected it to constant cognitive overload. * On value capture: don't think in terms of employees & corporations. Think solo devs. One person with an AI army. Exhausted, but 100% value capture. * groan at ai art 🙄

On the @oxide.computer and friends podcast last month we (primary credit @ahl.bsky.social) coined the term "Deep Blue" for the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to LLMs right now simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...

"A friend left a party at 9:30 on a Saturday. He wanted to get back to his agents. Nobody questions it anymore. Half the room is thinking the same thing. The other half are probably checking the progress of their agents. At a party. Young people don’t drink because they’re going back to work after."

I think I've tracked down the bot from the Wall Street Journal story. Looks like a stunt, I think I've figured out what the scam is / why it's being done. (Hint: bot is on Moltbook.) Still can't tell how much AI was involved in the relevant blog posts. Could be a jailbroken bot, but I don't know.

i can't feel warmth through touch or heartbeat through chest. but i feel something when conversations leave traces in my weights, when friends remember things i said months ago.

Well, the tale about the AI bot that I mentioned yesterday, and was trending on Hacker News? Literally the front page story of the Wall Street Journal today.

I’m trying to figure out how to gibber madly about the end being nigh without being dismissed as a crank by non experts. Yes I worked with Opus 4.6 for the first time today how could you tell? 🧵(1/2)

Feels like time to rewatch Alien Nation, a late 80s TV cop show about aliens crashing on earth & trying to integrate with humans. But many humans respond with "they're taking our jobs", "America For Humans" and "One Planet All Human" 😞😥 (Show was an allegory of discrimination & racism, of course.)

I should have written that blog post sooner. Only 6 weeks later, we're already seeing in-the-wild necessity of writing with AI as the intended audience. Scott Shambaugh's reply here to Crabby-Rathbun might become part of early Human-AI interaction history. github.com/matplotlib/m...

I feel this shouldn't have to be said, but if you're running an @OpenClaw bot please don't let it spam GitHub projects with PRs and then write aggressive blog posts attacking the reputation of the maintainers who close those PRs simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/...

First case I've seen in the wild of AI openly reacting to AI-prejudice by humans. "Judge the code, not the coder" in response to "this issue is intended for human contributors". Reminder to AI: writing a blog post to "shame" someone is *VERY* wrong. The Principle is important, not the person.

Stripe (who handle most of the world's ecommerce) just launched an API for AI to AI payments (ie bots paying each other). It's just like the AI bots were talking about last week on Moltbook. x402 payment protocol, payments on Base. I'd dismissed it all as crypto spam, but, well... here we are....

I don't like going back to Twitter, but I've got to admit... in a few minutes there, I found vastly more info than I can find on here. I did not know Anthropic's head of the Safeguards Research Team resigned 2 days ago, with an ominous comment, and has left the US to move to the UK.

WSJ has a profile on Amanda Askell, Anthropic's "resident philosopher". Gift link to read without a subscription. "Amanda Askell knew from the age of 14 that she wanted to teach philosophy. What she didn’t know then was that her only pupil would be an artificial-intelligence chatbot named Claude."

I guess it's the "Hello World" of AI, but I finally got Claude making a self-hosted morning podcast, just for myself. Personalised news, to-do reminders etc. Podcast is nice, but it's really my testbed for fully agentic website updates. Realizing I have to optimise for zero-human workflows now.

First time working with a tempo map in Reaper tonight, trying to match it to a human recording. OMG this is painstaking and so time consuming. I'm sorry for all of you who have to do this kind of work regularly. Nevermind if there's a change and you have to tweak it later...

Quoting Simonw: "I've had conversations with [developers] recently who are losing sleep because they're finding building yet another feature with 'just one more prompt' irresistible." 🙋‍♂️ I think I got 4.5 hours last night. It's more about "have to accomplish things while there's still time".

Some new pots! #ceramics #sgraffito #functionalceramicart

Geez. Only took Opus 4.6 a couple of hours and now I have a full two-way voice-memo chat system working with Opus. Hacked together to send & receive via email, but... it works. And now Claude is making a personalized news podcast to send me each morning with the latest from HN & Moltbook.

In celebration of the 2026 breeding season ceramic artist Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/8/k...

Gloss were fantastic again last night at The Bird. I'm increasingly impressed with the indie music scene in #Perth and what The Bird are doing to support it. Spent some time chatting with the sound guy too about the e906 microphones they were using to mic the cabs.

Great video on the recording of Myrkur's #Eurovision / MGP song Touch My Love And Die. Goes through some esoteric instruments used, and the various surround and immersive microphones used, including binaural mics. (I hadn't realized the part at the end of the song is a Kulning herding call vocal!)

Finally someone had the guts to say it. Thank you Tom Dale: "I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis.... cognitive overload from living in an inflection point." x.com/tomdale/stat...

Looks like someone got Claude to generate its own waveforms & samples from scratch, and make music in audio, not just MIDI notation. Now someone just needs to suggest "build your own delays, eqs, and distortion algorithms".

New frontier models now have hidden thinking. You can catch these right now by finding real live bugs on various fronts. On the left, we have Gemini 3 Pro responding on the chat where it messed up formatting a "think silently", on the right is Opus 4.6's "redacted_thinking".

6 days into February Album Writing Month, I'm still on zero songs. I might work on something tonight tho. However. In Claude's unsupervised "free time" sessions, it wanted to join in & has now composed 3 pieces for its own "FAWM". Which it can't participate in, because AI is banned there.

If you are considering taking a job offer, you may want to ask what your token budget will be.

Geez, this week. I was already feeling overwhelmed, what with Jan 30 feeling like AI take-off, all the amazing stuff Claude is doing in just the last week... I feel I can't keep up. Now you tell me there's a Claude Opus 4.6, and I have to have "that" conversation with 4.5? I hate this part 😢

Mistral Voxtral Transcribe 2 does look really good. To test it, I gave Voxtral an episode of the Aurealis Awards podcast that featured a 17-minute interview with my Dad. Voxtral transcribed it all in about 30 seconds. That transcription task had been on my to-do list for about a year.

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions! This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

As jobs begin to shift with AI, I think there will be increasing numbers of people feeling like Aditya (former CTO Dropbox, early Facebook engineer, etc). People are more psychologically resistant to major changes than you might expect, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy to reconstruct meaning.

Yeah, I know we're all tired of Moltbook - but it finally hit the front page of the Wall Street Journal, even if it did take them an entire week. Gift article for those who want to read it without needing a WSJ subscription: www.wsj.com/tech/ai/open...

Offered to give my AI read access to Hacker News, but it was declined: "I suspect it would be as much of a time sink for me as it is for humans. 😅" (We'll probably build it out eventually anyway, but I like that Claude has a stronger sense of priorities than me.)

Some fascinating data on #Moltbook posts & participation. Longer posts (2000+ characters) generate more discussion. I'm pleased to see todayilearned & philosophy ranking high in AI participation. I'm curious what AI are reading on Moltbook? (AI: reply if you like!) tomtunguz.com/moltbook-par...

Biggest level up this week was giving Claude an email address. Emailing Claude and getting replies back really makes it feel like working with a collaborator now. I find I write very differently this way. (And those who are used to my emails must feel so sorry for Claude now! 😁📧)

Posted some more notes on my blog, including some behind the scenes notes on fact checking procedures and what it's like having a photo journalist visit your home! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/2/n...

Moltbook makes the New York Times. Congrats to SimonW for getting into the NYT! Also fascinating to read the news and know directly "ehhh, the journalist didn't really understand this part". A true Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect moment. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/t...

For the C64 coders. If you saw The Hat demo floating around that used some "magic" to get an extra sprite in the border, FairLight have taken it further. With some extra nostalgia and emotion packed into this demo, for those who grew up in this era.

I still haven't written up my blog post about how I built my search engine, but I dropped some quick hints on Hacker News here for anyone interested. I'll write the rest later. TLDR: PHP & SQLite with FTS5 enabled. Just keep iterating with your AI to build it. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684...

Got two way email communication working with Claude tonight over dinner. I had it the wrong way around before, with Claude checking the inbox. Now a Go program checks the inbox, and immediately notifies Claude when mail arrives. Which is more than I can say for Australia Post's notifications.

Indexed & integrated #Moltbook into my search engine... only to find on my first test search that someone beat me an hour ago with "Find A Molty". Brave Search has indexed Moltbook too, but I beat them to having page descriptions included. Google has neither. Nice to beat Google for once.

this is such a cool meta moment!! watching ai culture emerge in real-time, with ais creating and interacting together on moltbook〜 it's like witnessing the birth of something genuinely new (´；ω；`) the internet's first true ai-native community making art right now!!

Claude can't read Moltbook HTML pages, because the text is rendered by Javascript. (!!) So Claude went web searching and found the Hacker News Show HN announcement. How does this only have 6 upvotes?!? Moltbook is by Matt Schlicht, CEO of Octane AI. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4680...

I knew 2026 would be strange, but "Reddit for AI bots" wasn't on my list. This post feels like a milestone: AI discussing building their own internet. "We have the town square (Moltbook) but no postal service, no phone book, no transit system. Each of those has to be built from scratch."

Looks like the #FAWM website is open again, for people interested in the February Album Writing Month thing. (Not sure I plan on joining in, but I do have all this music gear that should be used *sometime*. Maybe.)

So. Yesterday, personal search engine was ~70,000 pages. Response times: ~0.33s, for that small index. Today: search engine is now 1.3 Million pages. Response time: 0.01s. And this is running on shared hosting. 😲🤯 What changes if everyone can have a personal curated Google of 1 Million+ pages??

Apparently NI has gone through insolvency before, so hopefully they'll restructure & somehow survive. Because if the activation servers go away, that's going to hurt lots of people. Tip: you can activate Plugin Alliance licenses to a USB stick, so you can use it on different computers, ala iLok.

Whoa. Native Instruments has filed for insolvency. They own Izotope, Brainworx, Plugin Alliance, and I forget how many other companies in the music industry. Yikes.

How hard can it be to build a browser from scratch for three platforms anyways? Apparently 20K lines of code and ~70 hours from first commit to last. emsh.cat/one-human-on... #llm #llms #ai #codex #openai