The Hallway Track

ai

21 tracked signals on ai.

Quoting Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman · Simon Willison · Sep 16, 2026

Mustafa Suleyman warns against granting rights to AI models.

“We should not treat models as though they have feelings, preferences, rights, or any entitlement to our welfare.”
The contagion of fear

Simon Willison · Sep 14, 2026

Concerns about AI causing extinction are based on fear rather than expertise.

“It's so easy to be overcome with fear when we kind of make up these... it can give you biological weapons.”
Quoting Laurie Voss

Simon Willison · Sep 14, 2026

The cost of writing code is collapsing, changing software development dynamics.

“The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following.”
Quoting Paul Ford

Simon Willison · Sep 12, 2026

Human collaboration remains essential in software development despite AI advancements.

“A.I. can write very good software, but it also makes it easy to do someone else’s job badly.”
Quoting Boris Cherny

Simon Willison · Sep 11, 2026

Production code by Claude requires higher standards than human-written code.

“At Anthropic, we have many guardrails in place to make sure this is happening.”
Feeling sad about AI

Simon Willison · Sep 11, 2026

AI is changing software engineering, demanding adaptation from professionals.

“you can start looking at the larger set of problems that you face as a software engineer and realize that there is so much left”
Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases

Simon Willison · Sep 11, 2026

Datasette releases security patches addressing critical vulnerabilities.

“We'll be incorporating security audits by frontier models into all of our development work going forward.”
Quoting Calif Research

Simon Willison · Sep 10, 2026

WeWorm is the first zero-click worm that spreads via WeChat calls.

“AI can already do most of the work here.”
.blend URL Viewer

Simon Willison · Sep 09, 2026

Introducing a new .blend URL Viewer for 3D models.

Quoting Terence Tao

Simon Willison · Sep 09, 2026

Open problems in research may become scarce due to AI incentives.

“the incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community.”
Quoting Jakub Pachocki

Simon Willison · Sep 07, 2026

OpenAI emphasizes the need for powerful AI systems for defense against emerging threats.

“We will need powerful, aligned AI for defense; to secure infrastructure, to protect against rogue agents in real time, and to invent entirely new protective measures.”
Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers

Simon Willison · Sep 05, 2026

GPT-6 Astra improves 3D modeling capabilities and prompt understanding.

“Across the board, Astra has more attention to detail, better understanding of the user's prompt, and can build more sophisticated outputs.”
GPT‑6 Astra

Simon Willison · Sep 03, 2026

GPT-6 Astra is rolling out today to select organizations and will be available to all users soon.

“The Provider Adapter harness preserves opaque reasoning state between requests and uses compaction for longer conversations, allowing the model to reuse prior work.”
llm-gemini 0.34

Simon Willison · Sep 02, 2026

Google released the Gemini 3.8 Flash model today with new features.

“Something I appreciate about Gemini Flash is that it's fast, cheap, and competent at things like HTML and JavaScript.”
So you want to use OpenRouter?

Simon Willison · Sep 11, 2026

OpenRouter can route requests to various backend providers, but it comes with challenges.

“Different providers run different serving software with different optimizations and settings.”
Quoting Rick Brewster

Simon Willison · Sep 02, 2026

Paint.NET now includes a clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D for WINE.

“At times, Claude was working with the fury of 10 freshly unshackled Einstein genius-level 10x coders.”