Comment by simonw

Comment by simonw a day ago

104 replies

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Here are some reasons to start a personal blog:

1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.

2. It can be a big boost in job hunting. As a hiring manager two of the most important questions I have about a potential candidate are: Can they code? Can they communicate well? If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years that's still a big boost over candidates with nothing like that at all. In a competitive market that could be the boost you need to make it from the resume review to the first round.

3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.

4. It's a great way to help establish credibility. If someone asks you about X and you have a blog entry about X from five years ago you can point them to that.

5. Building a blog is really fun! It used to be one of the classic starter projects for new web developers, I think that needs to come back. It's a fun project and one that's great to keep on hacking on long into the future.

Notably none of the above reasons require your blog to attract readers! There's a ton of value to be had even if nobody actually reads the thing.

As a general rule, assume nobody will read your blog unless you actively encourage them to. That's fine. What matters isn't the quantity of readers, it's their quality. I'd rather have a piece read by just a single person that leads to a new opportunity for me than 1,000 people who read it and never interact with me ever again.

If you DO start to get readers things get even more valuable. I've been blogging since 2002 and most of the opportunities in my career came from people I met via blogging. Today I get invited to all sorts of interesting events because I have a prominent blog covering stuff relating to AI and LLMs.

But I do honestly think that a blog is a powerful professional tool even if nobody else is reading it at all.

If you want to give it a go I've written a few things that might be useful:

- What to blog about: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/6/what-to-blog-about/ - Today I learned and write about your projects

- My approach to running a link blog - https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ - aka write about stuff you've found

zelphirkalt 14 hours ago

About point 2: I have yet to have a job interview, in which the interviewer has even taken a look at my website. Well, actually I don't know that, of course, but what I want to say is, that none so far showed any sign or indication of having taken a look, and as a consequence also no sign or indication of knowing anything about any of my showcased projects. In 95% of the cases it was just that they want to do their one thing, their one test, and not consider the candidate as a person at all. No time for that these days, I guess.

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  • flpm 12 hours ago

    Also a hiring manager. I always do. For me a good personal site is a huge step towards a phone interview. I look for things people do not because anyone told them to do (college projects, internships, work), but because they were excited about it. That initiative and excitement is what will set you apart from the other 100 resumes that look exactly like yours.

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    • zelphirkalt 9 hours ago

      I hope you can "infect" others with this kind of view, so that more people adopt it.

      My CV currently also includes a link to my repositories and a page briefly describing some projects that got anywhere. Far from all of my 100 or so personal free time projects get finished, but some do, and those are described and linked in my CV and on my website.

      At least I do get interviews, which must mean at least something, and sometimes it's just the role that is not fitting. Often it is their tech stack and they do not believe in engineers learning things on the job, looking for a perfect match. Sometimes it was some test that they do, that presumes some knowledge about some library or that is some specific leetcode thingy, that I wouldn't code that way anyway, if I had the choice.

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      • deadbabe 7 hours ago

        Please no, I don’t want people making blogs just because they want to get a job from it at some point, they should be making blogs because they love to blog.

        Imagine everyone having some cookie cutter blog, just a standard part of a resume.

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  • taude 10 hours ago

    That's wild. I first typically LinkedIn search someone, and then web search someone, even before I get too deep into the resume (they've already been filtered and ranked for me).

    In the past I got a job I had for 8 years through my blog, a startup that eventually sold....

    So, it's been pretty good for me, and doesn't actually take that much extra effort on top of the learning you do daily working in tech.

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  • fabianholzer 6 hours ago

    I'm involved in screening CVs and interviewing candidates. If there is so much as a email adress that indicates a personal domain, I look it up to see whether behind it there might be something like a personal website. When the CV is good and Github repositories etc. are mentioned I also take a brief glance there. But indeed, it is very rather rare that I make the content a part of the interview.

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  • Joeboy 10 hours ago

    I do. I find interviewing pretty awkward and am happier if I can find something interesting to talk about. I'm bad at maintaining my own blog though.

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  • miketery 11 hours ago

    That’s a good signal for you. When you find the person who did look you will know they stand out.

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    • zelphirkalt 11 hours ago

      Only question is, how long I can comfortably hold out, not doing a shitty job, until I see that signal flaring up, because they seem far and few between, so far. It might also just be a Germany thing, this kind of hiring, that is blind to the genuinely curious and creative people.

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  • rustystump 7 hours ago

    You likely are interviewing at big companies. I have worked across the industry and the smaller the team the more they look at my website work etc. some even asked about game reviews on my blog during the interview.

    However, even at big companies it can be useful depending on context but you have to bring it up in relation to why you are a fit for the job. Genuine enthusiasm goes a long way especially in the dry corporate world.

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  • synergy20 13 hours ago

    or the job market is too crowded due to recent layoffs

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Brajeshwar a day ago

I like Point No. 4. By now, I have enough articles to point to when people ask the same questions over and over. I have been asked, “Do you always have a blog post for these questions?”

Another advice or a deduction that I learnt from reading biographies and many historical books is — write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived.

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  • simonw a day ago

    I really like that. It's absolutely true, I constantly find older stuff on my blog that I had entirely forgotten about and it's always interesting to get back in touch with past-me.

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    • Brajeshwar a day ago

      Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.

      Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)

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    • hdjrudni 7 hours ago

      Past-me was so dumb. Asked a lot of rookie questions. It's the one little piece of evidence that maybe I have actually learned a little something in the past 10 years.

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  • spankibalt 17 hours ago

    "[...] write as if you are writing for a stranger, even on your own personal blog/diaries/memoir — when you get older, your younger self will become a stranger and you will have forgotten a lot of things in that life you lived."

    How bizarre. Well, memory spaces are just that, I suppose. I write diaries and letters since before I entered school and my younger self does feel anything but a stranger to me; many of my memories are as lucid to me as they were all those decades ago, both life-changing as well as trivial ones.

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    • setopt 16 hours ago

      Depends on the person, I suppose? I have some strong memories from decades ago, but most of my normal memories of events fade within 5 years or so. The memories I do have from a decade ago are certainly not lucid but a bit blurry and sparse on details. I often wish I remembered better.

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      • joecool1029 10 hours ago

        > Depends on the person, I suppose?

        Probably. In my case long-term memory seems to be really strong down male side of my family so when I read my old stuff from 20+ years ago I remember it and know it was me, just a little different like 'damn, we don't wear clothes like that anymore' when you look at old pictures. The styles/culture/times change you are in and so you adapt to them, but you are still you. I hear this commonly though that some people don't feel like the old them is same person at all.

        For me: I have felt a continual sense of self since around kindergarten, before that memory is a little episodic (my earliest is going to hospital to visit my mom and sister after she was born, when I was age 2) but I feel the same 'me' in memories from kindergarten til now over 30 years later. I also do stuff like pick up and start reading a book, put it down, and then go back and finish from where I left off 3-4 years later. I've met a few other people that do that as well, but it's a little uncommon I think?

        On the flip side my working memory has always been really bad. My attachment to memory blanks under stress, some people will relate in things like public speaking. I remember in high school forgetting entire marching band drill one time and having to improvise because I stress blanked. The memory is there when this happens it's like it stops streaming to RAM, intuition takes over based on what it sees not what is known.

        What is incredibly useful, and this I always felt is for personal writing only (diary/journal)... writing allows for capturing a state of your own thinking/feelings at a time. I would often write to myself when major events happened (good or bad) and then later on I could interpret from the strong feelings what I was going through and see if I handled them or could handle them better. You don't need editing passes for this, it should capture your raw state. Probably good to do this if your memories fade as well, but I don't know. I will probably burn some of my old writing, things that have served their purpose. Apparently it makes you feel relieved doing it and some cultures have this concept.

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isodev 12 hours ago

And it's very easy to start with something that is also "social":

- https://write.as - a https://writefreely.org instance that also syncs with Mastodon, so people can see/discover/subscribe/ comment on your posts without extra hassle of setting up comments or other privacy invading tools.

- https://bearblog.dev - just text, very simple and quick to get started.

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ghaff a day ago

Sites like this one really emphasize monetization. Natural I suppose since it's startup-focused. But people used to be fine with blogs not having a monetary element at all.

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  • SoftTalker 9 hours ago

    I suppose if I were younger that might be of interest. I'm not looking for opportunities at this point. I live in a small town, I have probably one of the best (local) tech jobs I've ever had, not strictly on pay but the pay is enough and the overall chill level and quality of life is something I would not give up.

    I've sometimes thought about blogging but for what? I'm not interested in promoting myself or my "brand" and I can't write about anything that someone else with much deeper expertise hasn't already written about.

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    • bikelang 8 hours ago

      My blog is probably more detrimental to my “brand” than helpful. I also couldn’t care less about the self-promotion or monetization aspect or anything of that sort. I find writing and the act of creating to be a type of catharsis. I write exclusively for me.

      If you feel the occasional urge to blog - maybe just be self indulgent about it? I get a strange sense of satisfaction from twiddling with the CSS on a rainy afternoon. Just my random 2p that nobody asked for :)

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    • johannes1234321 3 hours ago

      To have notable income from blogging requires a very different frequency and posts which attract a broader audience (unless I go really deep and paywall it for experts) That turns blogging from keeping notes and sharing experience to a Job in itself. A Job I for one wouldn't like.

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  • HeinzStuckeIt 21 hours ago

    I wonder how much of that mercenary approach to blogging today resulted ultimately from the 2008 crisis. It feels like there was less pressure to make ends meet, and consequently no pressure to hustle, before that. And maybe it is also the influencer self-branding culture of Instagram being seen as the default internet, so when people do alt-internet things they carry over those same values knowingly or unknowingly.

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    • biztos 17 hours ago

      Additional factors that come to mind: the slow realization that you could be writing for an audience of one (yourself) after a brief surge of "famous bloggers"; and the rise of other forms of writing (social media, etc) that at least give you the illusion of an immediate audience. "Engagement metrics" and so on -- even if they represent the opposite of attention.

      I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere, but doesn't necessarily stay bottled up in the mind of the would-have-been blogger. Even while pseudo-blogging platforms like Substack are having something of an upswing of esoteric low-audience content.

      And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.

      Just as a simple example, I have a once-in-a-while newsletter+blog on a niche topic, and I could get way more eyeballs if I'd just rephrase things as a Reddit post, but I'm nostalgic about it living its own life on the Free-ish Web. Or, I suppose, this comment right here, which could just as well be on a personal blog with a "backlink" to yours.

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      • ghaff 11 hours ago

        >I think a lot of what used to go onto blogs now goes elsewhere

        That's been true of me. A paragraph or three that I would once have done as a blog now slip neatly and easily into social media of various sorts. Going to try to do something about that next year but this year ended up crazy for various reasons.

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      • carlosjobim 9 hours ago

        > And I can say from experience that it's tough keeping a blog going when you have near-zero readership, even if you still consider the act of writing something and putting it out in public to be instrinsically valuable to you.

        There are other ways to monetize, which doesn't depend on a lot of eyeballs. If you write high quality niche content and sell related products or services, then each eye ball can be worth a lot.

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  • SunlitCat 16 hours ago

    That's a trend I've noticed as well over the past few years. It somehow feels like it's becoming increasingly “important” to make money from whatever you do on the internet. The idea that you can just create things because you enjoy it, or because you want to share what you've made with others in the hope that they might like it and offer interesting feedback, seems to be fading away.

    I mean, I get it: the economic situation is tough for many people, and earning money matters. But the focus on creating something simply for the sake of sharing it seems to be disappearing more and more.

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    • HeinzStuckeIt 15 hours ago

      I have seen it said in hacker circles that people in their teens and twenties now are not just more reluctant to share stuff for free like FOSS, but they are even outright suspicious of such endeavors. To a generation who grew up on platforms and apps that maximize engagement for maximum profit, a community that doesn’t do that looks like a bunch of weirdos, maybe a cult.

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      • ghaff 11 hours ago

        I'm not sure I've seen that personally although most of the tech folk I know are at least somewhat older.

        In fairness, I do think "side hustles" and the like have become much more normalized as the default. And even if the odds are poor, there are least enough anecdotes of Substack authors, influencers, and the like making enough money to perk many people's interest.

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hlassiege 4 hours ago

This post really resonates with me, especially points 1, 3, and 5. I started blogging in 2001. I have old articles lying around that are completely obsolete - about PEAR, Swing, GWT, Subversion, etc.

I did it to share without having any idea who was reading or not. Probably nobody back then.

But it became a habit. Beyond tech topics, I started blogging about broader subjects: organization, hiring, salaries, company building.

And it's incredible how much I relied on it later as a sort of documentation, especially for everything related to company building. It's so valuable to re-read why we made certain decisions in the past. And it's also so valuable to be able to point new colleagues to that knowledge base.

And technically, I had fun. I went through Joomla, self-hosted WordPress, wordpress.com. I built my own plugins. Then I developed my own open source static blog generator (bloggrify.com) in the Nuxt ecosystem. That's when I created an English version of my blog.

Then I started feeling the need to share differently. I had the impression that blogging was becoming outdated, that younger generations weren't reading anymore. So I tried video format on YouTube.

I really enjoyed video production - there's still so much to learn: equipment, techniques, new tools.

But I realized that each format has its pros and cons. It's so much easier to update text when it becomes obsolete. It's also so much faster to produce. Video is so hard to make. So I got back into writing and even took it further by creating a blogging platform (writizzy.com).

In short, I learned a lot because I documented everything I did, which forced me to dig deeper into each topic to avoid saying nonsense. I also learned a lot because I wanted to test approaches, make videos, learn to build a static site generator and many other things, purely for the sake of learning.

Today, one piece of advice I give to every senior dev is to take the time to write. Doesn't matter if it's to publish somewhere or not. But to lay out your ideas, dig deeper into them, get perspective.

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sdqali 3 hours ago

My old blog posts come up in the first page of search results for niche topics a lot, and it is very satisfying when someone reaches out to say that they benefited from it.

On a side note, after writing frequently for ~12 years, I didn't write anything for the next 6. This discussion came at the right time - it nudged me to publish two posts yesterday.

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devsda 21 hours ago

This is all true but I'm not sure about establishing credibility with a blog, especially when an LLM can help fudge the details.

I like your idea of blogging about TILs. There are shallow posts about TILs(plenty on medium) and then there are posts that mention TILs along with specific gotchas they faced and workarounds on the topic. Those saved me hours of searching/debugging on couple of occasions and I'm glad that they did that.

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  • voxleone 13 hours ago

    You are mostly right. But I suspect that a good writer will remain good [or even better] with LLM's. In my experience the bad ones are detected immediately.

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Sverigevader 16 hours ago

Great comment! I was inspired by this article https://every.to/superorganizers/how-to-build-a-learning-mac... about Simon Eskildsen, which led me to his blog https://sirupsen.com/, which then led me to create https://juliusrobert.site for myself. It's not a traditional blog per se but it checks some boxes and I have the same quote as you do here as a reason to do this https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#writing-abo...

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ksec 20 hours ago

My biggest problem so far is with cost. I dont like recurring fees. I could pay a one-time fee for say 100 pages and last an eternality ( or 50 years or something ). I also dont like subscription, and it has nothing to do with subscription fatigue, it is just the way I manage my money since before Youtube or Netflix took off.

And so far I haven't seen any viable options. And right now I use HN comments as more like a blog post.

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  • jszymborski 20 hours ago

    Codeberg or GitHub pages are free. For static website hosting, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET is... well... nearly free.

    https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing

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    • brabel 18 hours ago

      Netlify is also a good free option for non techies since you can just drag a directory to deploy it. I’ve also used Cloudfare Pages.

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    • jjgreen 14 hours ago

      Likewise for GitLab, and a "nice" url <username>.gitlab.io

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  • kukkeliskuu 18 hours ago

    I use GitHub Pages for personal blogs. Connect it with your personal domain name in case later you want to run it somewhere else.

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    • mrec 16 hours ago

      I do this too (not the personal domain bit) but one thing to be aware of is that Google doesn't seem to index these sites unless you feed it each URL manually. Doesn't autodiscover, doesn't read a submitted sitemap.

      Not a showstopper for me since I don't expect anyone to be interested anyway, but might be for some.

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    • graemep 14 hours ago

      Given the tiny cost of running a blog, especially if you have a domain name, is it worth the saving? Its not even much work if you use a static site builder.

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      • kukkeliskuu 12 hours ago

        Reliability? It took me around 15 minutes to create a site with Claude Code using GitHub Pages with custom domain and somebody else is taking care that it is always running. What is the alternative?

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        • graemep 12 hours ago

          Shared hosting still exists which means someone else will take care of a static site very cheap.

          You could use Claude, or you could use one of many static site builders.

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  • ghaff 11 hours ago

    Believe it or not, Blogger still exists and is free. I did some research when I was looking to spin up a blog for professional purposes. I ended up just rolling it into my personal blog though, for various reasons, I haven't done a lot with it yet. Project for the new year.

    You can hate on Google all you like but it hasn't been killed by Google yet and has been a long time--and is simple, adequate, and free even if it doesn't handle all the more advanced use cases.

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  • al_borland 19 hours ago

    I recently setup a little blog on tilde.club. They had a built I blogging tool in the CLI, but I wasn’t a huge fan. It gives some hosting space as well and supports php, so I vibe coded a little something that lets me throw markdown files with a date as the file name into a folder. Once created, it posts to the blog. Right now it’s just one long running page (and individual posts can be viewed/linked). I’m debating between adding an archive or just only showing a certain number of posts and letting them age out (unless linking to the specific post). I also have php generating an RSS feed based on the markdown files, so they just works without any fuss.

    Of course my biggest issue is that I have started and deleted more blogs than I can count, so I don’t have any useful history, like I would if I would have stuck with one thing for the last 20 years.

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  • simonw 20 hours ago

    GitHub Pages gives you a neat URL - yourname.github.io - and is free forever and even lets you run GitHub Actions for free to operate a static site builder.

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    • runningmike 14 hours ago

      “Free” is not free. The dependency on MS should be evaluated for you as user and for your visitors ..

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      • [removed] 11 hours ago
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      • ghaff 11 hours ago

        There are always dependencies to various degrees.

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  • jjude 20 hours ago

    I blog using 11ty and host with netlify. No cost. There are gitlab pages, github pages and so many different options to blog for free.

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  • kistu_ 19 hours ago

    You could publish it as an onion service! Apart from keeping your computer running and an active internet connection, there isn't any other recurring cost.

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  • bell-cot 13 hours ago

    Isn't Wordpress hosting still free, at [something_unique].wordpress.com?

    Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.

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    • ghaff 11 hours ago

      >Biggest downside I know of: Wordpress is too much learning curve & overhead for a simple personal blog.

      That was the conclusion I came to when I was muddling through various options last year. I had a Blogger blog already and decided to just roll in whatever professional content I wanted to add, which was the right solution for me. It helped that various folks I knew didn't bother having hard boundaries behind personal and professional content and that worked for me as well.

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    • ksec 11 hours ago

      Thank You! This lead to me login and rediscover I actually had a blog 15 years ago.

      The thing that stopped me was much like what you said, learning curve and too much friction. Right now I have bearblog, mataroa.blog and nicheless, all with their own strength and flaws.

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  • nathias 18 hours ago

    I have supabase for data and cloudflare for hosting, its all free

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spragl 11 hours ago

6. It is good training for your communication skills.

But write it yourself, dont let LLMs do it. Otherwise forget the sixth reason.

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  • simonw 10 hours ago

    Yes!

    Good written communication is one of the key skills needed at the senior / staff engineer level. Blogging is a great way to exercise those skills.

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stackghost an hour ago

>1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.

>3. If you blog more frequently than that it can be a really valuable resource for your future self. I love being able to look back on what I was thinking and writing about ten years ago. Having a good tagging system helps with this too - I can review my tag of "scaling" or "postgresql" and see a timeline of how my understanding developed.

These are generally why I blog. I write the articles with an audience in mind, because I don't know a concept if I can't explain it cogently. And also I actually tend to refer back to my blog for my own reference surprisingly regularly. For example, I wrote an article on installing Debian on a PC Engines APU over the serial interface, and then getting the Unifi Controller running. Every so often when I update the Debian install on that box, or decide to change OSes on a different APU I'll refer to that article.

You wouldn't think that that would be so difficult but it was a surprisingly baroque process.

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cbzbc 15 hours ago

What are people using to edit entries - because while markdown is fine, a lot of the time I want to be able to drag in screenshots, snippets of other documents like rfcs and so on. So it ends up being easier to make those notes for myself rather than push them into anything publishable.

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hiAndrewQuinn 18 hours ago

I enjoy having a place to write that I can call my own, and it is a major flex when a topic comes up for a client like, say, migrating giant Subversion projects to Git, and I can whip out [1] and say "ah, I happen to know a thing or two about that".

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/reposurgeon/

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rr808 11 hours ago

> 1. It's a great way to learn. Teaching something to someone else has always been the best learning tool, and writing about something with an audience in mind is an effective way to capture some of that value.

ugh, I hate this. Often when doing a search for how to do something I get 100 beginner blogs that cover the absolute basics but have no depth. People who know what they're doing are drowned out.

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geekamongus 11 hours ago

I started following your blog when you were like, 14. Cool to see you here. I've kept up my blog for 25 years, and you were an inspiration along the way.

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maxerickson 10 hours ago

Seems like "you like to write and expect to enjoy it" should be high on the list.

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wkat4242 10 hours ago

The problem for me is, wordpress is a security disaster especially the plugins. I don't want to constantly worry about updating in time. One day too late and you can be screwed. I've seen it happen with other people.

I'm a huge fan of self hosting but internet facing stuff I don't want to run myself but all the commercial blogging services like medium have scummy tracking and analytics built in, or try to get my readers to subscribe to things.

Then I tried substack but they lean too heavily on the "newsletter" paradigm which I hate. Also they are starting to enshittify now too.

I don't mind paying for a service but they always want to double dip in tracking readers and selling subscriptions to them as well. Yuck.

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  • caseyohara 10 hours ago

    This is where static site generators can be a good option. I’m in the same boat. I don’t have any appetite for self hosting and maintaining some internet-facing application with a web server and a database and a million dependencies in between. So for my personal site, I generate it locally and stick the static files on S3. No database, no servers, no headache.

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    • SoftTalker 8 hours ago

      Agree, static HTML seems the only thing that is at all future-proof. Any hosted blog or platform will have the risk of shutting down or abandonment but if your source is HTML you can host that anywhere, with little setup. Even so I'd keep my posts in a text-based precursor format such as Markdown or Org-Mode. I don't think HTML is going away soon but it's not inconceivable.

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    • simonw 9 hours ago

      Yeah, static site generators solve so many of these problems. There's a lot less that can go wrong if your hosting is entirely static files out of S3 or Cloudflare or nginx or similar.

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      • bostik 9 hours ago

        Or as in my case, lighttpd, with all its CGI, user-input processing or dynamic execution modules not even loaded.

        Makes for an attack surface that gets delightfully close to zero.

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the_gipsy 17 hours ago

Do you use AI to write content nowadays? Or to review and format it?

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  • simonw 13 hours ago

    I don't let AI write for me. I have a "proof reader" which I use - it's a Claude project with these custom instructions:

    > You are a proof reader for posts about to be published.

    > 1. Identify for spelling mistakes and typos

    > 2. Identify grammar mistakes

    > 3. Watch out for repeated terms like "It was interesting that X, and it was interesting that Y"

    > 4. Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes

    > 5. Highlight weak arguments that could be strengthened

    > 6. Make sure there are no empty or placeholder links

    I do occasionally use an LLM to reformat data - "turn this screenshot into a Markdown list" kind of thing.

    I had it write me an HTML price comparison table for this post: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/#pricing - here's how: https://chatgpt.com/share/6921b10b-0124-8006-9356-8e32f6335b... - I carefully checked the numbers before I published it!

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  • SoftTalker 8 hours ago

    I don't see the point in using AI to blog. If I want to read what AI has to say about a topic, I'll just ask the AI directly.

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  • ghaff 12 hours ago

    The only time I used AI for writing was when I was cleaning up some reference architectures and needed some fairly boilerplate text for the intro background. But basically don't really use AI; maybe if I did more coding these days.

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ngcc_hk a day ago

Struggle quite a bit to share hobby interest via anything including instagram. Might try this. Back to date of html 1.0 and gopher …

I still sad about my favorite go to photography blog was gone dark because of the vendor is sort of gone I guess. Might be we have to live with Buddha worldview - nothing is permanent.

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  • the_gipsy 17 hours ago

    Jesus - writing will do you good. Start out with reading back what you wrote.

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usrbinenv a day ago

[flagged]

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  • simonw 21 hours ago

    It's not. I don't use LLMs to write for me.

    I mainly use them as a thesaurus and proof reader, and occasionally let VS Code autocomplete finish a sentence for me when I'm writing longer form pieces.

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  • topato a day ago

    That's a pretty hefty accusation to level at one of the most prolific Ai/LLM bloggers on HN lol

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    • usrbinenv 16 hours ago

      If it's not an LLM, I guess the author spent too much time around them, because it totally reads like an LLM. And that's not a good thing.

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      • simonw 13 hours ago

        Which bits read like an LLM?

        I didn't do any "it's not X, it's Y" or other classic LLM tropes as far as I can tell.

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        • woooooo 12 hours ago

          Might be the numbered list of short points that keyed OP. And it's actually a great communication style! So much so that they overtrained LLMs to produce them. I wonder if we're all going to have to get idiosyncratically slightly worse to avoid the suspicion in the future.

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