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What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
— Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via)
Tags: ai-ethics, ai, computer-history, internet-archive
Now OpenAI have launched their comparable offer: six months of ChatGPT Pro (same $200/month price as Claude Max) with Codex and "conditional access to Codex Security" for core maintainers.
Unlike Anthropic they don't hint at the exact metrics they care about, but the application form does ask for "information such as GitHub stars, monthly downloads, or why the project is important to the ecosystem."
Via @openaidevs
Tags: open-source, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, codex-cli
Questions for developers:
- “What’s the one area you’re afraid to touch?”
- “When’s the last time you deployed on a Friday?”
- “What broke in production in the last 90 days that wasn’t caught by tests?”
Questions for the CTO/EM:
- “What feature has been blocked for over a year?”
- “Do you have real-time error visibility right now?”
- “What was the last feature that took significantly longer than estimated?”
Questions for business stakeholders:
- “Are there features that got quietly turned off and never came back?”
- “Are there things you’ve stopped promising customers?”
— Ally Piechowski, How to Audit a Rails Codebase
Tags: technical-debt, software-engineering, rails
AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance, and there is little to differentiate one from the other. The latest models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, in particular, tend to leapfrog each other with minor hops forward in quality every few months. [...]
In this sort of market, branding matters a lot. Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, are positioning themselves as the moral and trustworthy AI provider. That has market value for both consumers and enterprise clients.
Tags: bruce-schneier, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, ai-ethics
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.
— Donald Knuth, Claude's Cycles
Tags: november-2025-inflection, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms
I just sent the February edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter:
Here's a copy of the January newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
I use Claude as a proofreader for spelling and grammar via this prompt which also asks it to "Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes". I'm delighted to report that Claude Opus 4.6 called me out on this one:
Tags: newsletter, kakapo, claude
Because I write about LLMs (and maybe because of my em dash text replacement code) a lot of people assume that the writing on my blog is partially or fully created by those LLMs.
My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I don't let LLMs speak for me in this way.
I'll let an LLM update code documentation or even write a README for my project but I'll edit that to ensure it doesn't express opinions or say things like "This is designed to help make code easier to maintain" - because that's an expression of a rationale that the LLM just made up.
I use LLMs to proofread text I publish on my blog. I just shared my current prompt for that here.
Please, please, please stop using passkeys for encrypting user data
Because users lose their passkeys all the time, and may not understand that their data has been irreversibly encrypted using them and can no longer be recovered.Tim Cappalli:
To the wider identity industry: please stop promoting and using passkeys to encrypt user data. I’m begging you. Let them be great, phishing-resistant authentication credentials.
Via lobste.rs
Free Claude Max for (large project) open source maintainers
Anthropic are now offering their $200/month Claude Max 20x plan for free to open source maintainers... for six months... and you have to meet the following criteria:
- Maintainers: You're a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo with 5,000+ GitHub stars or 1M+ monthly NPM downloads. You've made commits, releases, or PR reviews within the last 3 months.
- Don't quite fit the criteria If you maintain something the ecosystem quietly depends on, apply anyway and tell us about it.
Also in the small print: "Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. We accept up to 10,000 contributors".
Via Hacker News
Tags: open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow. [...]
Tags: andrej-karpathy, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms
If people are only using this a couple of times a week at most, and can’t think of anything to do with it on the average day, it hasn’t changed their life. OpenAI itself admits the problem, talking about a ‘capability gap’ between what the models can do and what people do with them, which seems to me like a way to avoid saying that you don’t have clear product-market fit.
Hence, OpenAI’s ad project is partly just about covering the cost of serving the 90% or more of users who don’t pay (and capturing an early lead with advertisers and early learning in how this might work), but more strategically, it’s also about making it possible to give those users the latest and most powerful (i.e. expensive) models, in the hope that this will deepen their engagement.
— Benedict Evans, How will OpenAI compete?
Tags: openai, chatgpt, benedict-evans, ai
