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"

"This is the most important thing when you're working with coding agents is they have to test the code. The best way to do that is to use a programming technique that we've been using for decades called test-driven development."

"If you use the term red/green TDD, that's programming jargon which I didn't used to use, but it is jargon for run the test and watch them fail. The agents know what that means."

"both Anthropic and OpenAI realized that code is the application like being a having these things generate code."

"both Anthropic and OpenAI realized that code is the application like being a having these things generate code."

"OpenAI's o1 was the first model to exhibit that. And now all of the models do it."

"in November we had what I call the inflection point where GPT 5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 came along and they were both just ex they were incrementally better"

"in November we had what I call the inflection point where GPT 5.1 and Claude Opus 4.5 came along and they were both just ex they were incrementally better"

"and I like Andrej Karpathy's original definition of vibe coding"

"this company called StrongDM has been pushing this and doing some really interesting experiments around this"

"somebody needs to assign you access to Jira and then give you access to Slack and all of that kind of thing"

"somebody needs to assign you access to Jira and then give you access to Slack and all of that kind of thing"

"they built their own simulation of Slack and Jira and Okta and all of this software they were integrating with."

"once they spun it up it was a little Go binary that sat there"

"you can tell Claude Code fire up a sub agent that uses Playwright to simulate a browser"

"I think Firefox just a few days ago, maybe last week, said that they'd done a release which was assisted by Anthropic."

"Anthropic had discovered a hundred like potential vulnerabilities in Firefox and responsibly reported them to Mozilla"

"I was talking to the founder of Linear the other day and this idea of the factory"

"if you talk to Cloudflare and Shopify both said they were hiring a thousand interns over the course of 2025"

"if you talk to Cloudflare and Shopify both said they were hiring a thousand interns over the course of 2025"

"Thoughtworks the big IT consultancy did a offsite a few about a month ago"