This new benchmark is an apt metaphor for the AIs ability to gaslight humans with legit-looking-but-wrong output. Oh, you can't find the raccoon? Huh. Sorry you're having trouble with that, meatsack. I tried to not make it TOO hard for you, lil bud, but I'll make it even easier next time.

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 4mo ago

I came up with a somewhat foolish new benchmark for testing image generation models, to exercise the new ChatGPT Images 2.0: "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio" simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/21/...

Tomorrow on The Pragmatic Engineer Podcast: Designing Data Intensive Applications with @martin.kleppmann.com

STOP SCROLLING. Mandatory watch. It's < 3m. Share to everyone. 🫡

💯💯💯 bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/t...

Bryan Cantrill@bcantrill.bsky.social · 4mo ago

The peril of laziness lost bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/t...

NORTH VIRGINIA OPOSSUM CRUSING THE COMMONWEALTH SINCE DUSK 😂 Sometimes the weird goof energy of an LLM hits just right

Simon Willison@simonwillison.net · 4mo ago

From the comments: /* Earring sparkle */, <!-- Opossum fur gradient -->, <!-- Distant treeline silhouette - Virginia pines -->, <!-- Front paw on handlebar --> ... static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/...

Reminder for whoever needs to hear it, today's cutting edge AI models are still very jagged in their "PhD-level intelligence". Put more bluntly, Opus 4.6 Extended sometimes can't count to 2. 🫠

>As we’re entering the phase of single-use plastic software, we might be moving the whole layer of responsibility elsewhere. "single-use plastic software" is a really a striking way of framing it. It feels very accurate, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.

Armin Ronacher@mitsuhiko.at · 6mo ago

Today Thorsten Ball said he's the bottleneck. I too am the bottleneck and it made me think. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/2/13/th...

It's hard to find balanced opinions on AI coding. Lots of the people pushing the envelope on AI-Assisted Engineering also have somewhat bonkers AI-maximalist perspectives. Here's some people who're in the thick of it, advancing the field but who I also trust to bring a thoughtful, balanced take 🧵

Hot-ish take: devs should be spending time now learning out how to be *efficient* with the tokens in their agent's context windows 1) it makes the agent perform better 2) tokens are gonna start costing more over the next couple of years These Ralph shenanigans might look real silly in retrospect

“Have you tried out Ralph Wiggum loop?!” “Are you still using beads?” “Is Gas Town actually legit?” “Know anyone who’s into BMAD?” These days I’m glad my family doesn’t know what my Serious Work Conversations sound like. It’s embarrassing. Let’s talk about how to deal with all this noise. 🧵...

Claude Code is an amazing product. It does amazing things. I love it. Amazing. It's also most typically used as a CLI tool. This does not mean that Claude Code is an amazing product BECAUSE it's a CLI. Tell me why I'm wrong!

Devs should be regularly sharing coding agent sessions with colleagues. I made a thing to make this super duper easy: custardseed.com 🧵...

CustardSeed - Publish Claude Code Sessions

Instantly share your Claude Code sessions online. Turn your sessions into shareable web pages with a simple slash command. Store sessions as GitHub Gists and view them beautifully rendered.

custardseed.com

Really nice measured, balanced and thoughtful writeup of a decidedly unbalanced and unhinged project 🙃

Maggie Appleton@maggieappleton.com · 6mo ago

I have Gas Town derangement syndrome and spent the last few weeks writing thousands of words on agent orchestration patterns; how they shift our bottlenecks and force us to ask whether and when we should stop looking at code maggieappleton.com/gastown

who hurt you?

Gonna start saying "Clod" when referring to Claude Code. I've felt a need to use its full name to disambiguate between the Claude Code - the coding agent - vs Claude - the general purpose chat bot, but it's so tedious to type it out in full. It's either CC or Clod, and Clod is more fun.

"Why is Claude Code better/worse than [other coding agent] - they’re both using the same models under the hood?" A reasonable question, so I spent some time reverse-engineering Claude Code's interactions with the model to illustrate why coding agent matters blog.thepete.net/blog/2025/12... 🧵...

Same Model, Different Results: Why Coding Agents Aren't Interchangeable

Reverse-engineering Claude Code reveals why it performs differently from other agents that use the same Anthropic models. The answer lies in sophisticated context engineering and tool orchestration hi...

blog.thepete.net

I continue to believe that context management is the #1 skill to develop if you want to get the most out of coding agents. But why? Modern models have a context limit of 200,000 tokens! That seems like a lot! There's a couple of reasons why... 🧵

This is a great summary of what code review is REALLY for. It also demonstrates why AI-powered code review does not help AT ALL with the most important aspects of code review: aligning the team around software design (#1 and #3 in the hierarchy). blakesmith.me/2015/02/09/c...

AI WON'T turn you into a 10x engineer but it CAN accelerate your day-to-day work. I'm hosting a live workshop early next month to help experienced devs level up from copilot to coding agents. No breathless hype, no "learn this one magical prompt" BS, I promise! blog.thepete.net/ai-assisted-...

AI-assisted Engineering Workshop Series

Level up from copilot to coding agents in this practical online workshop teaching AI-assisted Engineering practices for experienced developers. No breathless claims about 10x productivity. No suggesti...

blog.thepete.net

One thing you can do with skip levels is ask questions about things you believe you've communicated. You'll be surprised how often people haven't really internalized it.

Slides from my #kubecon talk today Feature Flags Suck! - The Problems With Feature Flagging and How To Avoid Them speakerdeck.com/phodgson/fea...

Feature Flags Suck! - KubeCon Atlanta 2025

<strong>Feature Flags Suck! - The Problems With Feature Flagging and How To Avoid Them</strong> OK, feature flags are actually pretty awesome, but if&hellip;

speakerdeck.com

Blurghed about managing you AI coding agent's context. Proactively trimming and refining the context your agent is working with is probably THE best way to improve the quality of it's work. But there's more to it than firing off a `/compact` every now and then. blog.thepete.net/blog/2025/10...

AI Coding: Managing Context

Managing your coding agent's context is super important - a bloated context window will erode the quality of your agent's work over time. Learn some new techniques for trimming irrelevant details from...

blog.thepete.net

"Many developers are surprised by the changes they have to make to their workflow when they're using AI. For example, <proceeds to describe eXtreme Programming>"

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

anildash.com

1000000%

Chris Coyier@chriscoyier.net · 10mo ago

I feel like how we feel about smoking on airplanes is how the next generation will feel about us just mainlining social media.

Super interesting proof-of-concept exploit against an AI agent via GH pull request. Very sneaky prompt injection which convinces an AI coding agent to subtly inject a remote backdoor into a codebase. A great example of @simonwillison.net's Lethal Trifecta! blog.trailofbits.com/2025/08/06/p...

Prompt injection engineering for attackers: Exploiting GitHub Copilot

Prompt injection pervades discussions about security for LLMs and AI agents. But there is little public information on how to write powerful, discreet, and reliable prompt injection exploits. In this ...

blog.trailofbits.com

Good example of why it's important to monitor your LLM-powered features in prod. Apparently some bug in Amazon's AI assistant where the product description isn't in it's prompt. Pre-production evals are super important, but wouldn't catch this. Monitoring some key metrics in prod would.

Such a nice way to illustrate the point

Jessica Kerr@jessitron.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Putting all your controllers in one directory and your views in another Is like putting the cortisone and hemorrhoid cream in the drawer with toothpaste because they're all tubes.

they should be taken to The Hague for this graph crime