No personal attacks, please. Also, please read the site guidelines because they explicitly ask you not to post comments of this particular sort. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Prior to the release of Fable I'd actually switched a lot of my day-to-day usage over to GPT-5.5, and was writing a bunch about it. Here's a recent post where I talked about a project completed using GPT-5.5: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/6/micropython-in-a-sandbo...
I'm kind of on the fence about it and have a similar feeling. I don't mean to undermine the effort he has put in over all the years. That's definitely commendable. But I have strong suspicions that he's becoming an AI influencer, with his own AI focused newsletter, so chances are major AI companies are approaching him. And also to be honest, I see far too many posts making it to the front page. @dang I trust in the moderators keeping things neutral. Just in this thread alone there are a few comments that got heavily down voted for simply having a different opinion.
Most of my posts that make it on Hacker News weren't submitted by me. You can see who is submitting what on https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net - including a few that I submitted which got nowhere at all.
I accept paid sponsors for my blog (the banner at the top of each page) and newsletter (a clearly marked sponsored message at the top). I try to stay at arms length from those as much as I can - I want it to be very clear that sponsoring me will not result in me writing about a company.
No personal attacks, please. Also, please read the site guidelines because they explicitly ask you not to post comments of this particular sort. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
If I'm a plant I'm a pretty bad one, I was calling Anthropic's behavior "egregious" just yesterday: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/2064936762099789960
I was pretty negative about their xAI datacenter deal too: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/7/xai-anthropic/
Prior to the release of Fable I'd actually switched a lot of my day-to-day usage over to GPT-5.5, and was writing a bunch about it. Here's a recent post where I talked about a project completed using GPT-5.5: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/6/micropython-in-a-sandbo...
I'm kind of on the fence about it and have a similar feeling. I don't mean to undermine the effort he has put in over all the years. That's definitely commendable. But I have strong suspicions that he's becoming an AI influencer, with his own AI focused newsletter, so chances are major AI companies are approaching him. And also to be honest, I see far too many posts making it to the front page. @dang I trust in the moderators keeping things neutral. Just in this thread alone there are a few comments that got heavily down voted for simply having a different opinion.
Most of my posts that make it on Hacker News weren't submitted by me. You can see who is submitting what on https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net - including a few that I submitted which got nowhere at all.
I accept paid sponsors for my blog (the banner at the top of each page) and newsletter (a clearly marked sponsored message at the top). I try to stay at arms length from those as much as I can - I want it to be very clear that sponsoring me will not result in me writing about a company.
Which comments do you feel were unfairly downvoted? I can take a look but would need specific links.