The Hallway Track

generative-ai

43 tracked signals on generative-ai.

Teaching LLMs to Speak Spotify — Yves Raimond & Jacqueline Wood, Spotify

AI Engineer · Sep 25, 2026

Spotify rebuilt its recommendation system as LLM-centric 'generative personalization' at 760M user scale

“moving from personalization as guesswork...to personalization as reasoning, which is able to analyze those results and really understand whether they are relevant to that user in a given context”
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.”
Gemini Live audio

Simon Willison · Sep 15, 2026

Google releases Gemini 3.8 Live, a new speech-to-speech model.

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.

Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5

Simon Willison · Sep 08, 2026

ChatGPT Images 2.5 improves image generation capabilities.

“Choose Sunburst for workflows where editing precision matters most, and Flare for fast, high-quality everyday image generation.”
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.”
Quoting Andrej Karpathy

Andrej Karpathy · Simon Willison · Jun 09, 2026

Karpathy says AI-generated software arriving 'on tap' triggers Jevons paradox, sharply increasing his own demand for software.

“I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially.”
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.”
Quoting Charity Majors

Simon Willison · Jun 17, 2026

In 2025 the economics of code production inverted, making code effectively free, instant, and disposable.

“the economics of code production were turned upside down”
Quoting Andreas Kling

Simon Willison · Jun 05, 2026

Ladybird browser will no longer accept public pull requests, citing that AI-assisted code breaks the effort-as-good-faith assumption.

“A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds.”
Quoting Jeremy Morrell

Simon Willison · Aug 19, 2026

LLMs enable a new era of extensible software by lowering the cost of authoring user extensions

“My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries.”
Don't be a meat proxy

Simon Willison · Aug 03, 2026

New term 'meat proxy' describes people who blindly relay AI output without validation

“By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.”
Quoting Bruce Schneier

Simon Willison · Jul 30, 2026

Bruce Schneier argues AI use for learning tasks causes critical thinking skill atrophy

“The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising arguments, will help develop the critical thinking skills they will need in their future careers. And without this constant mental exercise, those skills will atrophy.”
Scrimshaw Jukebox

Simon Willison · Oct 06, 2026

Claude Opus 5.5 composed surprisingly competent retro game music via a custom text format

“I wonder if the ability to compose competent music is similar to the 3D graphics thing - a new capability for text models that emerged in the past few months?”
YOSHIKI on AI, Art, and Ethics | Dreamforce 2026

Salesforce · Sep 19, 2026

Salesforce's ethics officer and musician Yoshiki discuss AI's impact on art, creativity, and ethics at Dreamforce 2026.

“because AI is moving so fast, it's an incredible opportunity for us to understand where we are and what has stayed the same and what is shifting.”
Transform prior authorization workflows with generative AI on AWS

AWS (re:Invent) · Jun 25, 2026

AWS pitches generative AI to automate healthcare prior authorization, citing $262B in annual denied claims.

“93% of the physicians reported that prior authorization causes care delays, and that number hasn't budged since 2021.”
Running ComfyUI workflows on Amazon SageMaker AI processing jobs

AWS Machine Learning Blog · Jun 22, 2026

AWS shows how to run ComfyUI generative-AI workflows on SageMaker processing jobs for batch image generation at scale.

“ComfyUI is a node-based, visual workflow builder for generative AI that makes it straightforward to compose, test, and iterate on complex image, audio, or video pipelines without coding every step.”
Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?

Simon Willison · Jul 22, 2026

Systematic study finds no evidence AI labs train models to draw pelicans on bicycles better

“Pelicans aren't drawn any better than other animals. Bicycles aren't drawn any better than other vehicles. And no lab draws the combination better than its pelicans and bicycles already predict.”
LLM cliché highlighter

Simon Willison · Jul 17, 2026

Simon Willison built a tool to detect and highlight common LLM writing clichés

“no fluff, no filler, no jargon”