> People posting their subjective experience is precisely what a lot of these pieces should be doing, good or bad, their experience is the data they have to contribute.

The plural of anecdote is not data. These subjective posts about experiences vibe coding, etc. may be entertaining but if you read 10 of them it doesn't give you an objective view of the state of LLMs. It gives you 10 opinions by 10 people who chose to blog about how they felt using a tool.

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The mundane examples were the point. I'm not picking things to show it in the best possible light, I picked a representative sample of the ways I've been using it.

I called out the terrible scatter plot of the latitude/longitude points because it helped show that this thing has its own flaws.

I know so many people who are convinced that ChatGPT's search feature is entirely useless. This post is mainly for them.

Simon says “what I used to Google I now try AI thinking models”

I didn’t feel that he was framing it as _revolutionary_ it felt more evolutionary.

Simon, for every person miffed about your writing, there is another person like me today who said “ok, I guess I should sign up for Simon’s newsletter.” Keep it up.

It’s easy to be a hater on da internet.

42lux, if you have better articles on AI progress do please link them so we can all benefit.

I wanna know when my research goblin can run on my box with 2x 3090s.

Yes this feels very AI like too. A ton of prose for very little substance lol.

I skipped half the article to get to the point, went back and re-read and didn't miss much.

"It seems incredibly concentrated on OpenAI to the detriment of anything else."

My most recent posts:

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/7/ai-mode/ - Google/Gemini

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/ - OpenAI/GPT-5

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/kimi-k2-instruct-0905/ - Moonshot/Kimi/Groq

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/anthropic-settlement/ - Anthropic (legal settlement)

- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/4/embedding-gemma/ - Google/Gemma

So far in 2025: 106 posts tagged OpenAI, 78 tagged Claude, 58 tagged Gemini, 55 tagged ai-in-china (which includes DeepSeek and Qwen and suchlike.)

I think I'm balancing the vendors pretty well, personally. I'm particularly proud of my coverage of significant model releases - this tag has 140 posts now! https://simonwillison.net/tags/llm-release/

OpenAI did get a lot of attention from me over the last six weeks thanks to the combination of gpt-oss and GPT-5.

I do regret not having written about Nano Banana yet, I've been trying to find a good angle on it that hasn't already been covered to death.

Never read his blog and I like the writing.

> he feels like an OpenAI mouthpiece now

That seems a little harsh. But, I felt the same about older blogs I used to read such as CodingHorror. They just aren’t for me anymore after diverging into other topics.

I really liked this article and the coining of the term “Research Goblin”. That is how I use it too sometimes. Which is also how I used to use Google.

His content seem pretty fair and balanced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=simonw

Or take a look at his website:

https://simonwillison.net/

At least you admit it's your opinion. Maybe that's your bias showing?

The original author submitted it, then when it didn't get traction it looks like two fans of his blog both submitted it around 12 hours later. Whether for internet upvote points or because they personally thought the article particularly great, I don't know.

Personally I generally enjoy the blog and the writing, but not so much this post. It has a very clickbaity title for some results which aren't particularly impressive.

Reposts are allowed through after 8 hours if a story hasn't had significant attention yet. After that, we treat reposts as dupes for a year or so. This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

This is on purpose, because we want good stories to get multiple chances at getting noticed. Otherwise there's too much randomness in what gets traction.

Plenty of past explanations here:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News : "Hacker News (HN) is a social news website"

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_news_website : "A social news website is a website that features user-posted stories. Such stories are ranked based on popularity, as voted on by other users of the site or by website administrators."

The article was recently published, users on HN submitted the article. Other users thought it interesting and upvoted. Earth has different time zones (I understand it's difficult for americans to grasp) and so different people are active at different times.

You're not negating anything they've said, but given some insight into why the case might be. However the cult of personality and brand still exists and as a result heavily distorts what could appear here.

Saying that someone ought to write better consistently for them to "make its way here" leans completely into the cult of personality.

I think following people would be better served though personal RSS feeds, and letting content rise based on its merit ought to be an HN goal. How that can be achieved, I don't know. What I am saying is that the potential negatives are far far understated than they ought to be.