Simon Willison’s Weblog

The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it's 1995.

Think about it: They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto (and yeah, we're not rich now). NFTs got a collective eye roll.

But AI? Different story. The same folks who hand-coded HTML while listening to dial-up modems sing are now vibe-coding with the kids. Building things. Breaking things. Giddy about it.

We Gen X'ers have seen enough gold rushes to know the real thing. This one's got all the usual crap—bad actors, inflated claims, VCs throwing money at anything with "AI" in the pitch deck. Gross behavior all around. Normal for a paradigm shift, but still gross.

The people who helped wire up the internet recognize what's happening. When the folks who've been through every tech cycle since gopher start acting like excited newbies again, that tells you something.

— Christina Wodtke