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Before there were cute little guys, there was Instinct. In August, the startup got its AI agent to market with an unusual playbook: invite-only, no marketing, and barely so much as a website. And yet, Instinct quickly became the buzziest thing in AI, garnering praise for its straightforward, text message-based interface and its ability to […]
President Donald Trump has a knack for turning words against his enemies. His first successful presidential run was built on monikers like "Little Marco" and "Crooked Hillary"; he changed "fake news" from a phrase describing scammy media outlets to a derogatory term for the press at large. Over the past few weeks, he's clearly decided […]
The two mainstream arguments are the extremes, because that's how our modern society rolls. It's either that there is an AI bubble that will crash, or that a rogue ASI will kill us all. What about the third possibility? What if GPT 3.5 -> Sonnet 3.5 -> Opus 4.5 -> Astra / Opus 5.5 just keeps going for the next few years? Based on my experience, that will eat all software and software-related meetings. Once lab researchers focus on fields other than software, they will eat those nearly as quickly. This feels like the real contrarian position in 2026. What does the US economy, which is >70% service-based, look like in the next 3 to 5 years if this happens? Does a couple labs having control of that percentage of the GDP make an economy? What if it happens too quickly? Is this the real reason why they are talking about "pacing the frontier" all of a sudden? Maybe due to the fact that the labs' own economists pointed out that collapsing your country's economy might not be a good idea? What does unemployment look like in the next few years in this scenario, in the USA? Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020096 Points: 4 # Comments: 2
I shipped a new feature for my blog today: the Newsletters page, which offers an index of all of the newsletters I've sent out, both my free weekly Substack and my monthly sponsors-only updates. I built the feature almost entirely using my voice, chatting away to my laptop while I cooked dinner. Codex voice mode I used the ChatGPT desktop app for this, in the Codex tab, using the voice conversation mode, running against a local development environment. Here's what that looks like: Three columns of the ChatGPT app. The left hand column shows my recent conversations. The middle column is a transcript of the conversation, with a throbbing black blob representing voice mode. The right hand column shows a local dev server version of my blog, with the Newsletters page visible. I started the session against my local simonwillisonblog checkout by typing: Start dev server and open in browser This gave me a preview of the site that it would be working on, and meant that I could later ask it to show me the new pages so I could visually track its progress. Then I clicked the "Start new voice chat" button - that's not the microphone button, it's the one to the right of it - and set my laptop up in the kitchen so I could talk to it while I cooked. Talking to my computer I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to build, and it's a simple enough Django feature that I was certain the model (in this case GPT-6 Astra High) would be able to do it. A new model, a migration, some view code, templates, and a couple of import functions to populate the database from external sources. Here's an extract of my voice transcript that was captured by Codex: Um, they do not. Um, this is going to be a new type of content. Um, it's not going to show up... Oh, hold on. Yeah, no- I do not want this to show up in my, um, tag pages and date archive pages and... Actually, no, I think... I don't want it on the tag pages. I don't want it on the, um, blog index page. But I think I do want it to show up on the date-based pages. You know, if you navigate to September the 19th, and I sent a newsletter on that page, I think I want that to show up. So... this is- so I think we probably need a new model. The other thing is that I want them searchable, uh the Substack ones are not searchable, because those are actually just copies of other s- on content on my blog. These monthly ones do contain unique content, and spe- and once they're... published, like once they're made public a month after they've gone out, I want them to show up on my search results. Apparently this was clear enough that the model knew what I wanted to build! You can read the full transcript, disfluencies and all, in this Gist . We went on like this for about half an hour (the time it took to cook dinner). The model would reply and occasionally ask clarifying questions, then get to work modifying the code. What we built We got a surprisingly long way entirely by voice: A new model and migration to represent imported newsletters in Django, plus Django Admin configuration for that Four working imports: The most recent Substack items via RSS Every other Substack item via their undocumented API, which GPT-6 Astra either knew about or found via search All of my published monthly newsletters from my simonw/monthly-newsletter-archive GitHub repository My most recent private sponsors-only newsletter from a private repository The /newsletters/ and /newsletters/2026/ public archive pages Newsletters showing up on day and month archive pages too, but not on tag pages or my homepage Weekly Substack newsletters link to Substack; archived monthly newsletters have their own pages Integration with my site search engine It was almost ready to ship. The catch was the imports: Astra offered to export data from my local copy so I could import that into production, but I wanted it to work like my other import scripts. Since some of the data lived in a private GitHub repository, this would involve creating a new API key, and for that I knew I'd have to sit at the keyboard for a while. Finishing it with a review Once I had finished cooking and judged it mostly feature-complete, I had Codex create a branch and open a pull request. I reviewed the code in the GitHub PR interface. It was nearly what I needed, except it had chosen to use Git in a subprocess for one of the import scripts. I needed one of the imports to pull from a private Git repository, so I figured the API would be a better bet. I switched to typing and had Codex swap that out for an API-based import instead. You can see the changes I made during the review in the extra commits on the PR . I fixed the import mechanism and made a few tweaks to the display of those public pages. It took an additional half hour of typing-based prompting to get to the point where I was happy to deploy it to production by landing the PR. The end result You can see the end result at the new newsletters index page , or view the page for a previous monthly newsletter . Newsletters page. It shows two Substack posts (with thumbnails) and one LLM digest Sponsors-only newsletter with a list of headings. On the right is a CTA to subscribe to my Substack and another one for my $10/month monthly briefing newsletter. The index page shows my most recent Substack weekly newsletters and GitHub sponsors monthly newsletters mixed together in reverse chronological order. Further down the page are links to my by-year archive pages. GPT-6 Astra designed the page, and then tweaked that design based on my vocal feedback from glancing at the local preview across the kitchen. Better for multi-tasking than as a daily driver OpenAI love using voice-driven demos like this one for things like DevDay - and they do work well in that environment. I don't think this is going to be a daily driver for me though. I've written before about how much "work" I get done using ChatGPT voice mode on my phone while walking the dog - mostly research and brainstorming, but occasionally actual development work by having ChatGPT write and test out snippets of code. This feels different. The addition of the visual preview, plus being able to type or paste things in via the keyboard when I need to communicate something that doesn't work vocally, makes this a much more powerful way of interacting with a coding agent. I still switch back to typing once I get down to the details of things though. Being able to paste in examples and error messages, or directly highlight the code or feature that needs changing, remains more efficient than trying to describe it in words. I mainly work from home, which is good because there's no way I'd want to talk to my computer like this in a shared workspace! The killer feature for me is the ability to multi-task. I usually cook with a podcast or TikTok running; now I can actually build stuff instead. Tags: text-to-speech , ai , openai , generative-ai , llms , newsletter , coding-agents , codex , speech-to-text , site-upgrades
OpenAI fired three safety researchers who helped investigate the Hugging Face hack. In an open letter, they warn that the firings are scaring remaining staff and eroding safety culture. OpenAI claims they violated policies but won't say how. The article OpenAI's safety crisis keeps getting worse and the company keeps making it worse appeared first on The Decoder .