[fontain]

oh come on, a paid shill?

Simon is very fascinated by AI and at times he can be a little too optimistic but he is generally balanced and his perspective evolves over time which can be seen in his writing.

Nerd who loves nerd things a little too much? Sure. Paid shill by Big LLM? Nah.

[emp17344]

The issue is he’s not actually balanced at all. I’ve never seen him say anything negative about an AI product.

[simonw]

Here's my AI misuse tag: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-misuse/ - 54 posts

My ongoing coverage of AI ethical issues: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ - 308 posts

I've been the loudest voice about the fundamental insecurity of LLMs for several years: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ - 150 posts

In https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/25/agentic-browser-securi... I said "I strongly expect that the entire concept of an agentic browser extension is fatally flawed and cannot be built safely."

[iLoveOncall]

Literally none of those articles are critizing LLMs, only use made of them by 3rd party actors outside of the providers. It really has nothing to do with LLMs themselves.

The fact that you had to dig to August 2025 to find a single article that's actually a critic of something produced by the AI labs is just further proof.

[simonw]

The prompt injection stuff is very critical of both the technology and the LLM providers especially when I call out that their solution is still to say "they're getting better at avoiding the attacks" when my line has consistently been that "99% is a failing grade".

[dotproto]

As someone involved in the WebExtensions Community Group who has been (slowly) trying to figure out what, if anything, we should do at the platform level around these use cases, I appreciate you raising and repeating this concern. I'd be obliged if you have any other recommended reading around this topic.

[fontain]

Days ago he said…

“I'm finding that coding agents can take me from a vague idea to a working solution, one with tests and documentation and that looks like a carefully considered project evolved over the course of many weeks... in less than an hour.

Even if the code is rock solid, there's a limit to how many projects like that I can sensibly care for - and if they're instantly abandoned, what value was there from creating them in the first place?”

https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/31/the-solution-might-be-...

Here is Simon questioning a fundamental belief held by the pro-LLM lobby. Would a paid shill question that?

Simon is, without question, an enthusiastic pro-LLM person. I disagree with what he says often, the product market fit post was a bad take. But I don’t believe he is shying away from sharing his thoughts when they’re not favorable to the industry.

[iLoveOncall]

That's not at all negative about LLMs, just negative about his own usage of LLMs. He's still very heavily and unrealistically (unless he has very poor coding standards and skills, which I won't rule out) praising LLMs in the sentences you've quoted.

Note that it's not surprising that he finds his own usage (described in the quote) negative, since his real job is as a blogger, not anything else.

[iLoveOncall]

Yes, a paid shill. You can find a clear point in time where he shifted from sceptic to 1000% fully onboard non-stop praise, with no reason.

[HDThoreaun]

Maybe the reason is because he thought the tools became really powerful?

[simonw]

I'd love to know when that point was myself!