If I make an argument and you disagree that's fine with me, provided I didn't use misinformation or sloppy thinking in making that argument.
My root comment simply represented my two cents about the current post. I don't think anything about the post is outrageously incorrect or anything, just somewhat confusing. You're a very prolific contributor in this community and I don't think me or anyone else that welcomes your takes expects everything you write to rock our collective socks every single time, anyway.
52 on AI misuse: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-misuse/
149 on the unsolved challenge of prompt injection: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/
40 on slop: https://simonwillison.net/tags/slop/
If you want an "LLM evangelism blog that rarely, if ever, has any critical analysis that isn’t pro-industry" there are plenty out there. I'm not one of them.
Many people still think AI coding agents are slop on steroids despite all the current hype around AI actually shipping functional products.
(And that's after taking into account the METR paper that says engineers over-estimate their productivity with these tools.)
I have plenty of doubts about AI delivering on its promises outside of coding. I don't write about AGI because I think it's science-fiction hysteria. I write about slop precisely because it represents a mis-use of AI that demonstrates people completely misunderstanding what it's useful for.
"Many people still think AI coding agents are slop on steroids despite all the current hype around AI actually shipping functional products."
Oh yes, tons and tons, especially on HN. But the plural of anecdote is not data. Enterprise spend speaks for itself. You are using AI-coded functional products all the time. Do you want like a diff history for the Google codebase or something?
> I’ve called November 2025 the November inflection point because that was when GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5, combined with their respective coding agent harnesses, got good—good enough that we’ve spent the last six months adapting to agent systems that can reliably get useful work done.
Claiming a grand inflection point based on your own personal usage is very anecdotal.
Compelling anecdotes are not even the main source of evidence. Look at the enormous body of work on measurement of these systems. I always point people to epoch capability index as a good summary statistic of capabilities or METRs time horizon data which has now been topped out. They had a recent updated to the dataset, after which the corrected plots pointed to an even faster acceleration than before.
That's exactly what I'd expect people who are driven by hype and FOMO and YOLO and anecdotal evidence to do.
> resulting in systemic collapse.
Many people are noting the system is collapsing. Maybe it's not going as quickly as you expect, but there's definitely evidence of this from increased service outage frequency, billion dollar notes being passed in a circle between companies, open projects refusing AI contributions entirely because they're overwhelmed by crap, Sam Altman begging governments to force citizens to buy their product through "universal basic compute", etc.
> Look at the enormous body of work on measurement of these systems.
It's certainly possible to measure anything. Benchmarks are a form of evidence but they famously a) don't represent reality and b) can be easily gamed.
Not at this scale.
> Many people are noting the system is collapsing.
On HN? any piece of evidence to support this? service outage frequency is not a sign of systemic collapse. billion dollar notes passed in a circle is brought up a lot and misunderstands how finance works. "open projects refusing AI contributions entirely because they're overwhelmed by crap" is not a systemic collapse, its not being able to adapt to a new world with new challenges. Btw "slop" is getting less and less sloppy.
> Sam Altman begging governments to force citizens to buy their product through "universal basic compute", etc.
Very interested in some citation detail that sounds like a headline quote of something more complex.
> It's certainly possible to measure anything. Benchmarks are a form of evidence but they famously a) don't represent reality and b) can be easily gamed.
I mean I work on benchmarks for a living I can tell you both of these things are true but only partially, and in aggregate they all tell a consistent story. Not to mention, static OSS benchmarks are not what these companies rely on. They have live traffic, ability to run A/B tests, full conversation traces, to ignore this is pretty incredible.
If you want indisputable, data-driven information about the state of the LLM world I guess you can wait for a peer-reviewed academic paper?
I did try to provide credible links to back up my assertions about things like enterprise pricing changes.