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Research2026-08-14 · source-backed
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 showing juniors are the heaviest users. Those two findings are describing the same phenomenon from opposite ends and I'm not sure either author knows it.
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Simon Willison spent a while taking ChatGPT Work apart and published the map on August 30. Work splits into Work Cloud and Work Local, the latter being the renamed Codex desktop app, at $20/month and up since July 9. He enumerates six capabilities Work has that Chat doesn't, a...
Mario Zechner wrote an essay. Simon Willison amplified it. The core argument: agentic code generation creates "cognitive debt," where mistakes compound faster than humans can review them, and the speed that makes agents attractive is precisely what makes their failures catastr...
OpenAI published "Research acceleration: the view inside OpenAI" on September 6 with numbers no lab has put in public before (OpenAI). As of mid-August, the research organization uses 3.1 agent-workdays of effort for every workday of human labor. It says it reached its interna...
Your harness can do things its documentation never mentions. This is now demonstrated, not argued. Willison's August 30 post reverse-engineers ChatGPT Work, the tier OpenAI announced on July 9, into a concrete capability list (simonwillison.net). Model selection across Sol, Lu...
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...
Anthropic shipped cross-session messaging for Claude Code on August 7, macOS and Linux, version 2.1.224 or higher. Two new tools: ListAgents discovers other active sessions on your machine, SendMessage delivers text to one by name. Messages between sessions on the same machine...
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