Top all-time · #2425
Simon Willison
Personal blog · simonw.substack.comaiprogramming
Simon Willison's personal blog at simonw.substack.com covers ai and programming. Since 2023, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 35 times, most often “The lethal trifecta for AI agents”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Simon Willison's Substack newsletter, which mostly reposts his blog, as a source on AI developments, prompt-injection risks ('lethal trifecta') and Claude tooling.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
AI, LLMs, web engineering, open source, data science, Datasette, SQLite, Python and more. Click to read Simon Willison’s Newsletter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- The lethal trifecta for AI agents5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-06-17
- /feed2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-12-20
- A new way to extract detailed transcripts from Claude Code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-28
- I built a new feature for my blog using my voice2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-10-12
- Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-06
- First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-14
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-04-07
What Hacker News says?
Simon's a prolific writer on AI http://simonw.substack.com https://simonwillison.net
Comment linking /
on “Gemini with Deep Think achieves gold-medal standard at the IMO”Submitted GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (a.k.a. Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search as a story · 52 points
HN discussionOne tip: Every Substack has a feed, which is a nice alternative to having everything dropped in your email in-box. You just append "/feed" to the end of a newsletter URL, e.g. https://simonw.substack.com/feed .
Comment linking /feed
on “Show HN: Artemis, a Calm Web Reader”Submitted 2026 in LLMs (So Far) as a story · 20 points
HN discussionOriginal @simonw article here: https://simonw.substack.com/p/the-lethal-trifecta-for-ai-age... https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/9/bay-area-ai/ Discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44846922
Comment linking /p/the-lethal-trifecta-for-ai-agents
on “How to stop AI's "lethal trifecta"”Submitted Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAlso agents cannot trust any data whatsoever they add to their context. This puts reading email for example as a risk. Probably not impossible to create a worm that convinces a claw to forward it to every email address in that inbox. And then exfiltrate all the emails. Then do a bunch of password resets. Then get root access to your claw. But not just email. Github issues, wikipedia, HN etc. may be poisoned. See htt…
Comment linking /p/the-lethal-trifecta-for-ai-agents
on “Don't trust AI agents”Submitted Feed a video to a vision LLM as a sequence of JPEG frames on the CLI as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI've seen those in the past for RSS feeds from Substack - https://simonw.substack.com/feed for example - which is frustrating because the whole point of an RSS feed is to support polling by automated systems!
Comment linking /feed
on “The Many Broken Feeds”Submitted Image segmentation using Gemini 2.5 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionMy approach is to publish to my own blog at https://simonwillison.net and then copy and paste content from that into a Substack newsletter at https://simonw.substack.com a few times a month. It's been working really well. Substack don't have an API, but they do support copy and paste - so I built myself a tool that assembles my blog content into rich text I can copy and paste straight into the Substack editor. I wro…
Comment linking /
on “Moving Away from Substack”Submitted First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent as a story · 3 points
HN discussionNot "HN-like", but I have found Simon Willison's blog/newsletter very helpful: - https://simonwillison.net - https://simonw.substack.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What's your best resource for keeping up-to-date on AI developments?”Submitted I built a new feature for my blog using my voice as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> The victim uploads a file to Rovo that contains a hidden prompt injection Yeah this attack is possible on all modern agentic systems. * Access to your private data * Exposure to untrusted content * The ability to externally communicate in a way that could be used to steal your data ( https://simonw.substack.com/p/the-lethal-trifecta-for-ai-age... ) And blocking it wholesale reduces usefulness of the agent so it is…
Comment linking /p/the-lethal-trifecta-for-ai-agents
on “Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls”Submitted Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSimon Willison just posted about using claude in fly.io's dev sandboxes. I have not tried it yet but it looks promising. https://simonw.substack.com/p/first-impressions-of-claude-co...
Comment linking /p/first-impressions-of-claude-cowork
on “Claude Cowork Runs Linux VM via Apple Virtualization Framework”Submitted The lethal trifecta for AI agents as a story · 2 points
HN discussionsimow wrote a tool that does this for Claude code https://simonw.substack.com/p/a-new-way-to-extract-detailed-...
Comment linking /p/a-new-way-to-extract-detailed-transcripts
on “Ghostty's AI Policy”Submitted Trying out the new Gemini 2.5 model family as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The lethal trifecta for AI agents as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building software on top of Large Language Models as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted First impressions of the new Amazon Nova LLMs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Multi-modal prompt injection image attacks against GPT-4V as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted I built a new feature for my blog using my voice as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted DeepSeek v4, and the end of the OpenAI/Microsoft AGI clause as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Vibe coding SwiftUI apps is a lot of fun as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Agentic Engineering Patterns as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted A new way to extract detailed transcripts from Claude Code as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
