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Policy2026-08-02 · source-backed
Willison collected the quote: "People really don't like when a coworker's ChatGPT contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker." That's a cleanly isolated variable, identical task, only the requester changed, and it's first-party evidence from inside the lab shipping the agents. If you're building agents that initiate contact with humans, the failure mode is social, and no amount of capability improvement fixes it.
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Promptwatch's tracking shows the share of ChatGPT search queries using site: sat at 0.3-0.5% for weeks, dipped to 0.15% on August 3-5, then jumped to 16-17% on August 8, two days after OpenAI said it was making GPT-5.6 Sol "more reliable with facts." Simon Willison Willison co...
First teased in February, Lockdown Mode is now live across Free, Go, Plus, Pro, and self-serve Business. It limits outbound network requests to break the exfiltration leg of Simon Willison's "lethal trifecta," using deterministic controls rather than asking an AI to evaluate w...
Willison quoted Florian Herrengt on August 12 about teams accumulating so many AI-generated layers that nobody retains a working model of the system. The artifact still works, the org loses the mid-level engineers who could reason about why. Hold that against the OpenAI paper...
His August 2 post concedes the result is real and attacks the inference as a fallacy of composition: success on one form of fancy cognition doesn't mean success on all forms is imminent. His sharpest technical objection is that math is uniquely favorable because it "allows for...
usehax.dev (104 points on HN) is a single native MIT-licensed binary that starts instantly on a few megabytes, auto-discovers model and runtime capabilities, and talks to OpenAI-compatible endpoints, Anthropic-compatible endpoints, Codex via ChatGPT subscription, OpenRouter, a...
Satya Nadella said companies routing everything through a single proprietary lab may not survive. His argument: you hand that lab your most sensitive business context, and the lab can turn it against you as a competitor. His prescription is an orchestration layer — keep the ha...
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