Simon WillisonModify

2026-02-16 07:59:36

The AI Vampire

Let's pretend you're the only person at your company using AI.

In Scenario A, you decide you're going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make everyone else look terrible by comparison.

In that scenario, your employer captures 100% of the value from you adopting AI. You get nothing, or at any rate, it ain't gonna be 9x your salary. And everyone hates you now.

And you're exhausted. You're tired, Boss. You got nothing for it.

Congrats, you were just drained by a company. I've been drained to the point of burnout several times in my career, even at Google once or twice. But now with AI, it's oh, so much easier.

Steve reports needing more sleep due to the cognitive burden involved in agentic engineering, and notes that four hours of agent work a day is a more realistic pace:

I’ve argued that AI has turned us all into Jeff Bezos, by automating the easy work, and leaving us with all the difficult decisions, summaries, and problem-solving. I find that I am only really comfortable working at that pace for short bursts of a few hours once or occasionally twice a day, even with lots of practice.

Via Tim Bray

Tags: steve-yegge, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, ai-ethics, coding-agents

2026-02-16 05:40:46

I'm occasionally accused of using LLMs to write the content on my blog. I don't do that, and I don't think my writing has much of an LLM smell to it... with one notable exception:

    # Finally, do em dashes
    s = s.replace(' - ', u'\u2014')

That code to add em dashes to my posts dates back to at least 2015 when I ported my blog from an older version of Django (in a long-lost Mercurial repository) and started afresh on GitHub.

Tags: generative-ai, typography, blogging, ai, llms, python

2026-02-16 05:06:44

We coined a new term on the Oxide and Friends podcast last month (primary credit to Adam Leventhal) covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.

We're calling it Deep Blue.

You can listen to it being coined in real time from 47:15 in the episode. I've included a transcript below.

Deep Blue is a very real issue.

Becoming a professional software engineer is hard. Getting good enough for people to pay you money to write software takes years of dedicated work. The rewards are significant: this is a well compensated career which opens up a lot of great opportunities.

It's also a career that's mostly free from gatekeepers and expensive prerequisites. You don't need an expensive degree or accreditation. A laptop, an internet connection and a lot of time and curiosity is enough to get you started.

And it rewards the nerds! Spending your teenage years tinkering with computers turned out to be a very smart investment in your future.

The idea that this could all be stripped away by a chatbot is deeply upsetting.

I've seen signs of Deep Blue in most of the online communities I spend time in. I've even faced accusations from my peers that I am actively harming their future careers through my work helping people understand how well AI-assisted programming can work.

I think this is an issue which is causing genuine mental anguish for a lot of people in our community. Giving it a name makes it easier for us to have conversations about it.

My experiences of Deep Blue

I distinctly remember my first experience of Deep Blue. For me it was triggered by ChatGPT Code Interpreter back in early 2023.

My primary project is Datasette, an ecosystem of open source tools for telling stories with data. I had dedicated myself to the challenge of helping people (initially focusing on journalists) clean up, analyze and find meaning in data, in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

I expected I would need to build a lot of software for this! It felt like a challenge that could keep me happily engaged for many years to come.

Then I tried uploading a CSV file of San Francisco Police Department Incident Reports - hundreds of thousands of rows - to ChatGPT Code Interpreter and... it did every piece of data cleanup and analysis I had on my napkin roadmap for the next few years with a couple of prompts.

It even converted the data into a neatly normalized SQLite database and let me download the result!

I remember having two competing thoughts in parallel.

On the one hand, as somebody who wants journalists to be able to do more with data, this felt like a huge breakthrough. Imagine giving every journalist in the world an on-demand analyst who could help them tackle any data question they could think of!

But on the other hand... what was I even for? My confidence in the value of my own projects took a painful hit. Was the path I'd chosen for myself suddenly a dead end?

I've had some further pangs of Deep Blue just in the past few weeks, thanks to the Claude Opus 4.5/4.6 and GPT-5.2/5.3 coding agent effect. As many other people are also observing, the latest generation of coding agents, given the right prompts, really can churn away for a few minutes to several hours and produce working, documented and fully tested software that exactly matches the criteria they were given.

"The code they write isn't any good" doesn't really cut it any more.

A lightly edited transcript

Bryan: I think that we're going to see a real problem with AI induced ennui where software engineers in particular get listless because the AI can do anything. Simon, what do you think about that?

Simon: Definitely. Anyone who's paying close attention to coding agents is feeling some of that already. There's an extent where you sort of get over it when you realize that you're still useful, even though your ability to memorize the syntax of program languages is completely irrelevant now.

Something I see a lot of is people out there who are having existential crises and are very, very unhappy because they're like, "I dedicated my career to learning this thing and now it just does it. What am I even for?". I will very happily try and convince those people that they are for a whole bunch of things and that none of that experience they've accumulated has gone to waste, but psychologically it's a difficult time for software engineers.

[...]

Bryan: Okay, so I'm going to predict that we name that. Whatever that is, we have a name for that kind of feeling and that kind of, whether you want to call it a blueness or a loss of purpose, and that we're kind of trying to address it collectively in a directed way.

Adam: Okay, this is your big moment. Pick the name. If you call your shot from here, this is you pointing to the stands. You know, I – Like deep blue, you know.

Bryan: Yeah, deep blue. I like that. I like deep blue. Deep blue. Oh, did you walk me into that, you bastard? You just blew out the candles on my birthday cake.

It wasn't my big moment at all. That was your big moment. No, that is, Adam, that is very good. That is deep blue.

Simon: All of the chess players and the Go players went through this a decade ago and they have come out stronger.

Turns out it was more than a decade ago: Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Tags: definitions, careers, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, oxide, bryan-cantrill, ai-ethics, coding-agents

2026-02-16 02:26:08

Gwtar: a static efficient single-file HTML format

The key trick it uses is to fire window.stop() early in the page to prevent the browser from downloading the whole thing, then following that call with inline tar uncompressed content.

It can then make HTTP range requests to fetch content from that tar data on-demand when it is needed by the page.

The JavaScript that has already loaded rewrites asset URLs to point to https://localhost/ purely so that they will fail to load. Then it uses a PerformanceObserver to catch those attempted loads:

let perfObserver = new PerformanceObserver((entryList, observer) => {
    resourceURLStringsHandler(entryList.getEntries().map(entry => entry.name));
});
perfObserver.observe({ entryTypes: [ "resource" ] });

That resourceURLStringsHandler callback finds the resource if it is already loaded or fetches it with an HTTP range request otherwise and then inserts the resource in the right place using a blob: URL.

Here's what the window.stop() portion of the document looks like if you view the source:

Amusingly for an archive format it doesn't actually work if you open the file directly on your own computer. Here's what you see if you try to do that:

You are seeing this message, instead of the page you should be seeing, because gwtar files cannot be opened locally (due to web browser security restrictions).

To open this page on your computer, use the following shell command:

perl -ne'print $_ if $x; $x=1 if /<!-- GWTAR END/' < foo.gwtar.html | tar --extract

Then open the file foo.html in any web browser.

Via Hacker News

Tags: archiving, html, javascript

2026-02-16 01:23:28

It's wild that the first commit to OpenClaw was on November 25th 2025, and less than three months later it's hit 10,000 commits from 600 contributors, attracted 196,000 GitHub stars and sort-of been featured in an extremely vague Super Bowl commercial for AI.com.

Quoting AI.com founder Kris Marszalek, purchaser of the most expensive domain in history for $70m:

ai.com is the world’s first easy-to-use and secure implementation of OpenClaw, the open source agent framework that went viral two weeks ago; we made it easy to use without any technical skills, while hardening security to keep your data safe.

Looks like vaporware to me - all you can do right now is reserve a handle - but it's still remarkable to see an open source project get to that level of hype in such a short space of time.

Update: OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger just announced that he's joining OpenAI and plans to transfer ownership of OpenClaw to a new independent foundation.

Tags: ai-agents, openclaw, ai, open-source, domains, openai, peter-steinberger

2026-02-15 21:36:20

I saw yet another “CSS is a massively bloated mess” whine and I’m like. My dude. My brother in Chromium. It is trying as hard as it can to express the totality of visual presentation and layout design and typography and animation and digital interactivity and a few other things in a human-readable text format. It’s not bloated, it’s fantastically ambitious. Its reach is greater than most of us can hope to grasp. Put some respect on its name.

— Eric Meyer

Tags: css, web-standards, eric-meyer