I Hope This Email Finds You Before I Do I Hope This Email Finds You Before I Do Last Week in AWS · lastweekinaws.com This post was filled with real life, snark, entertainment, feelings. I get a lot of these emails that claim they can change my SEO game if I give them 500, for a site making 0, Link partnerships from small startups. A lot of these are so automated that if I do respond I dont even get a response. I’ve responded to many simply asking what is this about, I get 10 others just like you a week. Can you tell me what exactly you want and what each of us benefit from it, how did you find me. All normal questions, they almost always result in crickets, no response, maybe its time to implement a Billie for more snark.
Posts tagged: ai
All posts with the tag "ai"
112 posts
latest post 2026-10-01
Publishing rhythm
Absolute banger of a conference talk, saving to come back with more notes later.
Opencode is changing on the daily right now, today I noticed the word low pop
up in Orange text in my opencode window. Looking into this they are exposing
variants to the user. This allows
you to change between fast or slow and thinking, the later taking more time to
prepare before doing an action.
It looks like this toggle may have been here for awhile and I’m just now discovering it. Potentially because its a new feature of the free Zen provider.
Variants Many models support multiple variants with different configurations. OpenCode ships with built-in default variants for popular providers.
Built-in variants OpenCode ships with default variants for many providers:
Anthropic:
high - High thinking budget (default) max - Maximum thinking budget OpenAI:
Varies by model but roughly:
none - No reasoning minimal - Minimal reasoning effort low - Low reasoning effort medium - Medium reasoning effort high - High reasoning effort xhigh - Extra high reasoning effort Google:
low - Lower effort/token budget high - Higher effort/token budget
Context Is King
A new approach to agentic workflows. This is probably news to no one else, I’m sure I’m behind on this one. You can’t one sentence prompt and expect to get what you want. Agents.md Writing Complete Prompts
Ping 17
I'm not sure if its good to keep issues and plans in the repo long term, but
I'm going to give it a shot.
> read @pages/issues/issue-1.md create a plan to fix the issue, then write your
> plan to fix in @pages/plans/fix-issue-1.md
Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype I'm glad someone was brave enough to say this. There is a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the software development community these days. Much of it is justified, but if … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net Never believe in absolutes, see what I did there. The hype bros will take you to the extremes, ai will take your jobs in six months or be burned to the ground in six months. How about its useful now and will be more useful in six months. If you turned off the hype bro feed for six months you would probably be fine, in fact you would probably be better off for not capturing so much noise along the way. AI has gone the way of next js framework, it churns fast, hype bros are always an expert that know exactly whats best for everyone. It changes fast, what was the best last week might be dead next week. In fact getting to know what works well for you and knowing that tool really well for a longer period will take you farther.
Salesforce gets pwnd by the ai hype bros and killed its reputation with employees, letting them know where they truely stand with them. 4k people sounds like a lot, its probably a big chunk of savings, but was it worth the loss of reputation? There must be a better way to give this a trial run that lets them understand this before disrupting the lives of real people right???
Ai
Last updated Jan 2026. Seealso Looking for all posts tagged with ai see [[ tag/ai]] Ai is a tool I use a lot for code generation, research, image generation, and debugging. The words I publish on this site are my own unless explicitly stated from the top. There’s only one or two posts in this category. Words are mine The core of what this blog is, is my thoughts ideas, sharing experiences. The words are the important part. They are not perfect, I often do not spell or grammer check, and what is here is from a flow state of writing and very often not refactored. No AI unless explicitly stated code gen Up till around 2023 all of the code to create the site was hand written by me. I have my own site generator that I maintain markata. From 2023 through 2025 snippets of code, sometimes entire plugins or modules were created in chat apps like chatgpt. There was no agentic coding, windsurf, cursor, claude code, opencode, none of it. It was all integrated into the site by hand. Starting around…
I’m In On Agents
It’s the start of 2026 and agents are getting a lot better than they were. I’m using opencode at home, free mode with Zen and big pickle. At work I have access to a wider variety of models including what seems to be the gold standard 3 from anthropic opus, sonnet, haiku. Note I’ve sat on this post for over a month, refactored it a few times, things feel like they are moving so fast that its hard to keep my feelings straight. Things are changing Around Aug 2025 I wrote I'm Out On Agents. I saw others in the space having such great success I gave it a solid shot, but found it to egregious edit more than I asked, make massive unneeded changes, and make more small bugs hidden in the details than was worth it. This was just after the tipping point where not just hype bros were making the switch, but people I work with, people I trust and have made really good Software in their career. People like the creator of Flask Armin Ronacher. People who are really good at writing code and do not need…
I thought this was an interesting take from Simon. I’ve been hearing him consistently say there will be more demand for software engineering in the future. More companies will have the ability and need to deal with software applications, but fewer of us will be hand editing any code. I thought this was an interesting interaction in the clip. Uh Simon, what do you got for us? I’ve just got the one. I think the act of the the the job of being paid money to type code into a computer Yeah. will go the same way as punching punch cards. Okay. I do I think in six years time I do not think it will anyone will be paid to 80:56 — just do the thing where you type the code. Just type the code. Okay. I think software engineering will still be an enormous career. I just think the software engineers won’t be spending multiple hours of their day in a text — editor typing out syntax. 81:09 It will look like punching cards. I think — so. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. In uh in six years. Um and but software — engineering still very much exists. I believe so. I I hope so. [laughter] I — very much hope so because I think the um the challenge of being a software — 81:23 engineer is not remembering how if wha…
This is opencode’s init prompt.
Please analyze this codebase and create an AGENTS.md file containing:
1. Build/lint/test commands - especially for running a single test
2. Code style guidelines including imports, formatting, types, naming conventions, error handling, etc.
The file you create will be given to agentic coding agents (such as yourself) that operate in this repository. Make it about 150 lines long.
If there are Cursor rules (in .cursor/rules/ or .cursorrules) or Copilot rules (in .github/copilot-instructions.md), make sure to include them.
If there's already an AGENTS.md, improve it if it's located in <dir>
Photoshop for text In the near future, transforming text over an entire document will become as commonplace as filtering images. Steph Ango · stephango.com While the non deterministic nature of llms scare the heck out of me in the sense of just cutting it loose on my writing. letting it go through all of my files and just edit them. I do like the idea of mundane tools like “desaturate”, “Gaussian blur”, evolving out of it for text. I don’t yet see this with the tools we have now, but it will be interesting to see them evolve.
I’ve found Gemini to be very useful lately, especially for finding information within long form content.
When writing thought-896, I wanted to use a direct quote from Jeff Dickey, Gemini popped it out very quickly.
give me a quote from jeff just before the timestamp I'm at the interviewer
asked what makes a good cli and he started talking about stdout/stderr
In another case, my wife and I are huge Good Eats fans. Alton Brown taught us how to cook during college and on. We watched every single good eats episode nearly 10 years after they aired. He is back with some updates to those those shows on his Youtube. Gemini gives very good detailed responses with timestamps.
Alton Brown had a recent YouTube video for cooking turkey. Can you get the
instructions from the video?
Developer Vs Artist Ai
The other day I was watching [thePrimeTimeagen]https://youtube.com/@theprimetimeagen?si=jVcp23FbfQSFZfDc) and he talked about devs loving ai and artists revolting. There was some discussion in chat about art being more creative and prime quickly squashed that. He ended with being oddly confused why developers are jumping on board and artists are not. Both had their art stolen to build out the models. my own vibes I’m writing this from my phone without further research, all vibes, personal experience, and thoughts, no research. Good Tools First I want to argue that artists have had some form of ai in their tools for years. Idk, probably not ai as we know it today but functionally similar. Content aware fill. This is a Photoshop feature from Adobe, as far as I know it’s one of the special things you get from Adobe that you don’t get from the FOSS alternatives easily. This is an example of a good took that is well loves by the community and widely used, if you put ai in it to make it bett…
I did not realize all the places to be considered as AI water usage. Hank goes deep highlighting all of the sources he is aware of, most reports leave off a lot of these sources, some reports go maybe too far adding sources that may not make sense depending on the question you are asking. As someone that runs computers with gpus in their house, and watching LTT make AIO installs on GPUs I’ve wondered what would AI use water for, now I understand that its a lot. No where near agriculture, but a lot. Unlike running a gpu in your house, potentially with a closed loop AIO, data centers are filled with hardware making heat and it all must go somewhere. Current technology has this done with evaporative cooling, i.e. its not a closed loop, the water goes into the sky. He goes on to point out that its not just the data center, using water, but also chip fab and power plants. Something I hadn’t put a lot of thought into is the type of water. While a lot of agriculture and power applications do not use municipal water, a lot of data centers do, putting excess strain on water treatment. Something I find interesting is that Altman is doing the same thing here that he does on his financial numb…
A quote from Claude I found the problem and it's really bad. Looking at your log, here's the catastrophic command that was run: rm -rf tests/ patches/ plan/ ~/ See that ~/ at the … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net damn this is a rough one. A users entire home directory removed by claude code from an rm command. Reading the first half of that command it LGTM. If you had approved rm, you are hosed. If this is inside a larger script its running, you really gotta read close. This one still feels pretty obvious, but I can imagine some bash doing some nasty things I miss if I read it and understand it let alone glance at it. I’ll take this as a reminder that I really need to be paying full-ass attention to agents, and moving towards a better sandbox for them, something in docker, maybe something like distrobox that is a magic wrapper over podman that just gives you the things you need for what it does. Something that starts up with access to start web servers, run agentic cli of choice, see project, git commit. It feels like the right thing has a lot of what distrobox does, but distrobox has too much and would be prone to this using it as I’ve used it in the past.
Linus is Techbrophobic like the rest of us. This is such an unexpectedly mild take from him. I expected some threat to the mother of the vibe coder, but he gave a pretty great middle of the road take. The industry sucks, it smells off, we know a lot wrong with it, it feels like theres a lot more wrong than we know. But the tools that its making are really good when used in the right ways. They are not a replacement for anything, they are assistive. They can lift someone from not knowing how to code to making a small webapp for their use. Someone who wants to write backend and give them a decent front end, someone who whats to write front end and give them a decent backend. Great take from someone with more experience than most can ever dream of having, worth a listen.
A ChatGPT prompt equals about 5.1 seconds of Netflix In June 2025 Sam Altman claimed about ChatGPT that "the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours". In March 2020 George Kamiya of the International Energy Agency estimated that "streaming a … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net This feels very promising for the future as we enter a world that is more and more dependent on AI that inference is so cheap. I did not understand the scale to how much cheaper inference is compared to training. As we get better with training I imagine this gets significantly better as well. I know they all claim to be profitable on inference, but scrolling through Simon’s feed here you see several articles on the stark difference.
Absolutely banger of a video, what a wild idea to send gippity a bit off course and just see how far off the rails it will go. Dude did a banger of an edit on it. I’ll admit that I listened to the whole thing, but did not watch much, saving here as I might go back when I have time to really watch it. It was really weird how easy it was for chat to say something that could be true, but nearly no chance of it actually happening over and over and just keep it going down this dark spiral of conspiracies. It was ready to electrocute him and separate him from anyone who had a chance of being a non believer. At any moment was ready to say that those closest to him might be his problem. gipity is not your friend, or your therapist.
Techbrophobic
I just heard someone drop the this term and it kinda fits a lot of shit on the internet right now. Arguing that its OK to question AI, its OK to like it, its OK to question if it needs to be in every goddamn thing we do, question its morality on training and the slop being pushed at us all the time. I’m not Technophobic I’m Techbrophobic I heard this and it kinda hit with a lot of things that I’ve resonated with lately. Tech bros of today have been compared to Steve Jobs in a lot of ways. Whether its style or the way he was so good at marketing, but this feels different. When Jobs launched the iPhone as this next great thing, He fucking made the thing. No broken promises of being sold something with hopes that it will do more tomorrow. No pushing around insane amounts of money with the hope to become profitable years down the line. No fear pushing that if you are not doing X today your business will be dead in 6 months. Giving us the promise that it was about to create an entire indust…
Calendar data could not load. Try again.