Simon WillisonModify

2026-01-04 11:03:20

I'm not joking and this isn't funny. We have been trying to build distributed agent orchestrators at Google since last year. There are various options, not everyone is aligned... I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour.

It's not perfect and I'm iterating on it but this is where we are right now. If you are skeptical of coding agents, try it on a domain you are already an expert of. Build something complex from scratch where you can be the judge of the artifacts.

[...] It wasn't a very detailed prompt and it contained no real details given I cannot share anything propriety. I was building a toy version on top of some of the existing ideas to evaluate Claude Code. It was a three paragraph description.

— Jaana Dogan, Principal Engineer at Google

Tags: anthropic, claude, ai, claude-code, llms, ai-assisted-programming, google, generative-ai

2026-01-03 13:57:07

Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?

This is one of those things that's so cool I'm just going to accept it as true.

(I only today learned from the Hacker News comments that Veridis Quo is "Very Disco", and if you flip the order of those words you get Discovery, the name of the album.)

Via Kottke

Tags: music

2026-01-03 03:57:37

My experience is that real AI adoption on real problems is a complex blend of: domain context on the problem, domain experience with AI tooling, and old-fashioned IT issues. I’m deeply skeptical of any initiative for internal AI adoption that doesn’t anchor on all three of those. This is an advantage of earlier stage companies, because you can often find aspects of all three of those in a single person, or at least across two people. In larger companies, you need three different organizations doing this work together, this is just objectively hard

— Will Larson, Facilitating AI adoption at Imprint

Tags: leadership, llms, ai, will-larson

2026-01-03 03:10:43

The most popular blogs of Hacker News in 2025

The engine behind the project is the domain-meta.csv CSV on GiHub, a hand-curated list of known personal blogs with author and bio and tag metadata, which Michael uses to separate out personal blog posts from other types of content.

I came top of the rankings in 2023, 2024 and 2025 but I'm listed in third place for all time behind Paul Graham and Brian Krebs.

I dug around in the browser inspector and was delighted to find that the data powering the site is served with open CORS headers, which means you can easily explore it with external services like Datasette Lite.

Here's a convoluted window function query Claude Opus 4.5 wrote for me which, for a given domain, shows where that domain ranked for each year since it first appeared in the dataset:

with yearly_scores as (
  select 
    domain,
    strftime('%Y', date) as year,
    sum(score) as total_score,
    count(distinct date) as days_mentioned
  from "hn-data"
  group by domain, strftime('%Y', date)
),
ranked as (
  select 
    domain,
    year,
    total_score,
    days_mentioned,
    rank() over (partition by year order by total_score desc) as rank
  from yearly_scores
)
select 
  r.year,
  r.total_score,
  r.rank,
  r.days_mentioned
from ranked r
where r.domain = :domain
  and r.year >= (
    select min(strftime('%Y', date)) 
    from "hn-data"
    where domain = :domain
  )
order by r.year desc

(I just noticed that the last and r.year >= ( clause isn't actually needed here.)

My simonwillison.net results show me ranked 3rd in 2022, 30th in 2021 and 85th back in 2007 - though I expect there are many personal blogs from that year which haven't yet been manually added to Michael's list.

Also useful is that every domain gets its own CORS-enabled CSV file with details of the actual Hacker News submitted from that domain, e.g. https://hn-popularity.cdn.refactoringenglish.com/domains/simonwillison.net.csv. Here's that one in Datasette Lite.

Via Hacker News

Tags: hacker-news, sql, sqlite, datasette, datasette-lite, cors

2026-01-02 12:33:47

I sent the December edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month:

• An in-depth review of LLMs in 2025
• My coding agent projects in December
• New models for December 2025
• Skills are an open standard now
• Claude's "Soul Document"
• Tools I'm using at the moment

Here's a copy of the November newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

2026-01-02 08:48:16

[Claude Code] has the potential to transform all of tech. I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away.

— Ben Werdmuller

Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms