Yes. That’s a scandal.

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I agree with you that they should credit the data model to Sapling and Mononoke.

I do not think that their failure to do so in the original post (that credited Sapling) was an outrageous lapse of judgement.

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Given that Anthropic credited Sapling, and Mononoke is a component of Sapling (the server part of it), I don’t find this complaint particularly convincing.

If Anthropic hadn’t credited Sapling I’d see their behavior as extremely bad form.

(I’d I was Anthropic I’d update the original announcement to credit Mononoke, too.)

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Presumably that was a pretty small pool?

I don’t know of any open source VCS systems designed to handle that scale. Commercially there’s Perforce, but how does pricing work for that? If it’s licensed per install then a million agents is going to be too expensive even for a company with billions of dollars.

(I just had a dig around, Meta’s Sapling and Microsoft’s Scalar look relevant here. Also I think Perforce is still per-employee and not per-agent, so probably a credible option here.)

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Yeah, that prose is gross.

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I personally am not happy about this, the last place I want AI to touch is my Linux.

Is that for ethical reasons or code quality reasons or both?

If it’s the former then fair enough. If it’s the latter, one could make a credible case that Linus Torvalds is the most experienced code reviewer in the world.

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One of my least popular opinions is that lines of (good, tested, understood) code is actually a useful metric.

It only becomes useless the moment you start measuring it and telling employees that it’s part of how you evaluate their work.

There are skills required in either case, and from what I’ve read, it seems it requires just as much attention to detail to keep the LLM from going “off-script”

Right, that’s what I’m getting at when I talk about skill. You need to know what good code looks like, and understand the peccadillos of coding agents, and know how to productively counteract those peccadillos and get them to produce good code.

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Yeah, that’s a good point. The EU have enough collective weight that they could have a material impact here.

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Ryan Dahl seems to agree with you:

There are some good ideas in Deno and it’s well engineered - but it ultimately is not solving big problems. It has been sucked into the gravity well of node compatibility, which forces it to behave exactly as Node does. Why reimplement Node? It works. Marginal performance or UX or security benefits are not enough.

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I found this article’s list of criteria for “inevitable technology” to make a strong case for coding agents and AI-assisted software development.

• The technology can perform a task to a standard equal or not markedly inferior to that of an alternative technology doing the same task. The code I get from coding agents is better than code I can write myself. It’s better than most of the code I’ve seen from collaborators over the course of my career. I think it takes skill to get those results out of a coding agent, but that’s why I see coding agents as augmenting, not replacing, skilled programmers.
• The task in question is socially valuable: we need a lot of it done, and it’s currently done by labour that is, in some sense, scarce. Writing software is very obviously this. Software engineers have always been scarce.
• The technology can, in volume of adequate output or in quality of output, overwhelmingly outclass what alternative technologies can do. Absolutely. Armed with a coding agent I can produce thousands of lines of good, tested, understood code in a day (or tens of thousands if I skip the “understood” piece and reduce my criteria for “good”). Without a coding agent I tap out at a few hundred lines per day. A good IDE isn’t going to get me the same boost.
• There’s no way in which the people not using the technology can change their behaviour to neutralise the impact of the technology. This one does have options: regulation. If people not using coding agents can pass or interpret laws such that code by coding agents cannot be sold, can’t have copyright applied, or is otherwise illegal, they might be able to stem the tide. At this point that’s getting into international treaty territory though, which is still possible - it mostly worked for copyright.

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The Dwarf Fortress codebase. It’s not open source, but at some point they didn’t even have it in version control [1]. That’s so wild to me. It’s art.

In terms of stuff where the source is available, for me that’s pretty much anything from the demo scene. This one for example: https://js1k.com/2012-love/demo/1100 - or https://frankforce.com/city-in-a-bottle-a-256-byte-raycasting-system/

[1] March 2013: “I don’t use version control – I didn’t like the feeling of having the code get committed into a black box thingy with no immediate upside” - March 2016: “I don’t even use version control. If you don’t know what that is then you’re not gonna yell at me. If you even know what version control is you’re gonna be like, ‘You don’t use version control? You don’t use source control? What is wrong with you? How can you even work? I’m just not cut out for it, in a sense. It’s been 15 years, so the reasons have change over time, but that’s my current understanding of it.” - March 2023: “I’ve got Discord channels to check and version control stuff to use now, so the process is definitely a little more involved”

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Node.js grew a Deno-style permission model in version 22.13 in January 2025: https://nodejs.org/en/blog/release/v22.13.0

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Scrollytelling really needs to go out of fashion.

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Absolute legend. She was honored in an excellent Lego set.

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There was a melancholy comment about this on Hacker News that I appreciated:

I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don’t know, there’s probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight.

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Or not having the date at all! Way too often I find myself digging around in view-source to try and find any indication of a date in metadata or whatever. I that fails I hit the Internet Archive and hope they’ve recorded the earliest known date for the post.

When something was posted is crucial context for understanding the perspective of the author.

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Since this is Rust I went looking for a WebAssembly build. They have one, but weirdly they expect you to download a zip file and then serve it via localhost yourself in order to try it out.

So I uploaded that zip file to my S3 bucket and now you can try it here: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/photocraft-web-0.2.0/ (loads a 27.1MB WASM file)

I’m baffled as to why they don’t offer the hosted version themselves somewhere obvious!

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I found this story so uncomfortable! Dealing with people who lie directly to your face is really unpleasant.

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On the “meandering intro” - I find the inverted pyramid helpful. Assume that many people won’t get past the first paragraph, so try to deliver the core message there.

“Overreliance on links” makes me sad. I love linking to things. I have a suspicion that nobody on the internet clicks links any more, if they ever did.

“Drop the formality. Write the way you speak in real life.” - 100% agree. You have a voice, use it! This is also where LLM writing really hurts you, it eliminates that voice, and people can tell.

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Plenty of these businesses do offer a hard budget limit now, so they clearly see value in not losing a potentially long-lasting commercial relationship with a customer over a one-time mistake.

It’s also common for surprise overages to result in a customer support case that eventually ends up with the customer being refunded.

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