Simon Willison
Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Simon reads OpenAI's own account of how its researchers use coding agents, noting a sharp late-July jump in AI spend per researcher and what that implies about internal model access.
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
Terence Eden's reading of an Interisle report: of 85 million new gTLD registrations in 2025, roughly one in five are likely scams. A sobering look at abuse rates ICANN has debated for years.
There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
Simon's Lobste.rs comment on why rewrite-from-scratch rarely rescues a codebase drowning in debt: the old system stays a moving target while its maintainers lose any incentive to do more than the minimum.
Quoting Zach Kehs
A short quote worth sitting with: buildings collapse if you keep adding floors, but software faces no such physical limit, so code can always get worse through one more layer of indirection.
Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers
OpenAI's developer launch of GPT-6 Astra, which claims better prompt understanding and notably strong 3D model generation. Simon spots his pelican-on-a-bicycle benchmark making a cameo in the launch video.