Simon Willison

"It used to be you'd ask ChatGPT for some code and it would spit out some code and you have to run it and test it."

"Anthropic came up with Claude Code back in sort of February of 2025 and it took off like crazy and a bunch of people started signing up for $200 a month accounts"

"These days, I'll often just tell Claude, here's a URL to this thing, here's another thing. Go and read the source code and then solve this new problem. And it works so well."

"I never used Apple Script because Apple Script is a whole programming language you have to learn and I've been using Apple Script for like two and a half years now because ChatGPT knows Apple Script"

"and so now I can automate things on my Mac and that's great"

"I spend way too much time on Hacker News"

"I use that one more than the one on my own computer. Partly because that's the one you can access through your phone."

"If you've got the Anthropic Claude app installed on iPhone, there's a code tab and you can go in there"

"OpenAI came out with GPT 5.4 about 3 weeks ago. It's very very very good. I think it's on par with Claude Opus 4.6"

"I think it's on par with Claude Opus 4.6 and possibly even better."

"OpenAI Codex and OpenAI Codex and Claude Code are almost almost indistinguishable from each other now. They're both very very good pieces of software."

"sometimes via the Gemini app. Like that that's that's a good option as well. And then I mean for image generation I'm using Gemini"

"I've got 10,000 Apple notes as well that I just constantly add new things to"

"I'd written some code which used a PDF library from Mozilla. So it's in JavaScript but it can open up a PDF and show you that PDF on the page."

"I'd also written some code that used Tesseract, which is an OCR library that can run in your browser and do actually really good OCR all in JavaScript."

"So I told Claude Opus, I said, 'Here is the code for the OCR, the PDF thing I did. Here's the code for the OCR thing. Build a new thing that can open a PDF file and OCR every page.' And it did it."

"I don't run it myself outside of a Docker container where I set it up to safely poke it and see what it could do. I got one running right here on my Mac Mini."

"I don't run it myself outside of a Docker container where I set it up to safely poke it"

"I got one running right here on my Mac Mini. Did you buy the Mac Mini for it? Yeah, I did."

"The easiest one would be like a folder synced to Dropbox or something like that"