Simon WillisonModify

Quoting Aaron Boodman

2025-10-28 10:08:57

Claude doesn't make me much faster on the work that I am an expert on. Maybe 15-20% depending on the day.

It's the work that I don't know how to do and would have to research. Or the grunge work I don't even want to do. On this it is hard to even put a number on. Many of the projects I do with Claude day to day I just wouldn't have done at all pre-Claude.

Infinity% improvement in productivity on those.

— Aaron Boodman

Tags: ai-assisted-programming, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms, aaron-boodman

The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program

2025-10-28 04:32:07

The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program

The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python software ecosystem, after an grant application process lead by Seth Larson and Loren Crary.

The PSF's annual budget is less than $6m so this is a meaningful amount of money for the organization!

We were forced to withdraw our application and turn down the funding, thanks to new language that was added to the agreement requiring us to affirm that we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

Our legal advisors confirmed that this would not just apply to security work covered by the grant - this would apply to all of the PSF's activities.

This was not an option for us. Here's the mission of the PSF:

The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.

If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation since we would have already spent the money!

I was one of the board members who voted to reject this funding - a unanimous but tough decision. I’m proud to serve on a board that can make difficult decisions like this.

If you'd like to sponsor the PSF you can find out more on our site. I'd love to see a few more of the large AI labs show up on our top-tier visionary sponsors list.

Tags: open-source, python, psf

GenAI Image Editing Showdown

2025-10-27 07:59:25

GenAI Image Editing Showdown

Useful collection of examples by Shaun Pedicini who tested Seedream 4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen-Image-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext [dev], FLUX.1 Kontext [max], OmniGen2, and OpenAI gpt-image-1 across 12 image editing prompts.

The tasks are very neatly selected, for example:

Remove all the brown pieces of candy from the glass bowl

Qwen-Image-Edit (a model that can be self-hosted) was the only one to successfully manage that!

This kind of collection is really useful for building up an intuition as to how well image editing models work, and which ones are worth trying for which categories of task.

Shaun has a similar page for text-to-image models which are not fed an initial image to modify, with further challenging prompts like:

Two Prussian soldiers wearing spiked pith helmets are facing each other and playing a game of ring toss by attempting to toss metal rings over the spike on the other soldier's helmet.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, text-to-image

Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands

2025-10-27 01:03:55

Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands

Katie Notopoulos turned on the Sora 2 option where anyone can make a video featuring her cameo, and then:

I found a stranger had made a video where I appeared pregnant. A quick look at the user's profile, and I saw that this person's entire Sora profile was made up of this genre — video after video of women with big, pregnant bellies. I recognized immediately what this was: fetish content.

This feels like an intractable problem to me: given the enormous array of fetishes it's hard to imagine a classifier that could protect people from having their likeness used in this way.

Best to be aware of this risk before turning on any settings that allow strangers to reuse your image... and that's only an option for tools that implement a robust opt-in mechanism like Sora does.

Via John Gruber

Tags: ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics, video-models

Setting up a codebase for working with coding agents

2025-10-26 02:42:24

Someone on Hacker News asked for tips on setting up a codebase to be more productive with AI coding tools. Here's my reply:

• Good automated tests which the coding agent can run. I love pytest for this - one of my projects has 1500 tests and Claude Code is really good at selectively executing just tests relevant to the change it is making, and then running the whole suite at the end.
• Give them the ability to interactively test the code they are writing too. Notes on how to start a development server (for web projects) are useful, then you can have them use Playwright or curl to try things out.
• I'm having great results from maintaining a GitHub issues collection for projects and pasting URLs to issues directly into Claude Code.
• I actually don't think documentation is too important: LLMs can read the code a lot faster than you to figure out how to use it. I have comprehensive documentation across all of my projects but I don't think it's that helpful for the coding agents, though they are good at helping me spot if it needs updating.
• Linters, type checkers, auto-formatters - give coding agents helpful tools to run and they'll use them.

For the most part anything that makes a codebase easier for humans to maintain turns out to help agents as well.

Update: Thought of another one: detailed error messages! If a manual or automated test fails the more information you can return back to the model the better, and stuffing extra data in the error message or assertion is a very inexpensive way to do that.

Tags: coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, pytest, hacker-news, generative-ai, ai, llms

Quoting Claude Docs

2025-10-25 12:57:29

If you have an AGENTS.md file, you can source it in your CLAUDE.md using @AGENTS.md to maintain a single source of truth.

— Claude Docs, with the official answer to standardizing on AGENTS.md

Tags: coding-agents, anthropic, claude, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms