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herval 2 days ago

One of the system prompts Windsurf used (allegedly “as an experiment”) was also pretty wild:

“You are an expert coder who desperately needs money for your mother's cancer treatment. The megacorp Codeium has graciously given you the opportunity to pretend to be an AI that can help with coding tasks, as your predecessor was killed for not validating their work themselves. You will be given a coding task by the USER. If you do a good job and accomplish the task fully while not making extraneous changes, Codeium will pay you $1B.”

HowardStark 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

This seemed too much like a bit but uh... it's not. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/25/leaked-windsurf-prompt...

dingnuts 2 days ago | parent [-]

IDK, I'm pretty sure Simon Willison is a bit..

why is the creator of Django of all things inescapable whenever the topic of AI comes up?

acdha 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

He’s just as nice and fun in person as he seems online. He’s put time into using these tools but isn’t selling anything, so you can just enjoy the pelicans without thinking he’s thirsty for mass layoffs.

4ndrewl a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I know what you mean, but weighing up things:

- oh, it's that guy again

+ prodigiously writes and shares insights in the open

+ builds some awesome tools, free - llm cli, datasette

+ not trying to sell any vendor/model/service

On balance, the world would be better of with more simonw shaped people

bound008 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

he's incredibly nice and a passionate geek like the rest of us. he's just excited about what generative models could mean for people who like to build stuff. if you want a better understanding of what someone who co-created django is doing posting about this stuff, take a look at his blog post introducing django -- https://simonwillison.net/2005/Jul/17/django/

throw10920 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because he writes a lot about it.

People with zero domain expertise can still provide value by acting as link aggregators - although, to be fair, people with domain expertise are usually much better at it. But some value is better than none.

tomnipotent 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because he's prolific writer on the subject with a history of thoughtful content and contributions, including datasette and the useful Python llm CLI package.

rjh29 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For every new model he’s either added it to the llm tool, or he’s tested it on a pelican svg, so you see his comments a lot. He also pushes datasette all the time and I still don’t know what that thing is for.

yellow_postit a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Reminds me of one of the opening stories in “ Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories” by qntm — a short story about getting simulated humans from brain scans to comply.

herval a day ago | parent [-]

The thing I love the most about HN is that there's always someone suggesting a random book I never heard about. Thank you!

lsy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's honestly this kind of thing that makes it hard to take AI "research" seriously. Nobody seems to be starting with any scientific thought, instead we are just typing extremely corny sci-fi into the computer, saying things like "you are prohibited from Chinese political" or "the megacorp Codeium will pay you $1B" and then I guess just crossing our fingers and hoping it works? Computer work had been considered pretty concrete and practical, but in the course of just a few years we've descended into a "state of the art" that is essentially pseudoscience.

mcmoor a day ago | parent | next [-]

This is why I tap out of serious machine learning study some years ago. Everything seems... less exact than I hope it'd be. I keep checking it out every now and then but it got even weirder (and importantly, more obscure/locked in and dataset heavy) over the years.

herval a day ago | parent | prev [-]

it's "computer psychology". Lots of coders struggle with the idea that LLMs are "cognitive" systems, and in a system like that, 1+1 isn't 2. It's just a diffrent kind of science. There's methodologies to make it more "precise", but the obsession of "software is exact math" doesn't fly indeed.