Simon is very fascinated by AI and at times he can be a little too optimistic but he is generally balanced and his perspective evolves over time which can be seen in his writing.
Nerd who loves nerd things a little too much? Sure. Paid shill by Big LLM? Nah.
My ongoing coverage of AI ethical issues: https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics/ - 308 posts
I've been the loudest voice about the fundamental insecurity of LLMs for several years: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ - 150 posts
In https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/25/agentic-browser-securi... I said "I strongly expect that the entire concept of an agentic browser extension is fatally flawed and cannot be built safely."
The fact that you had to dig to August 2025 to find a single article that's actually a critic of something produced by the AI labs is just further proof.
“I'm finding that coding agents can take me from a vague idea to a working solution, one with tests and documentation and that looks like a carefully considered project evolved over the course of many weeks... in less than an hour.
Even if the code is rock solid, there's a limit to how many projects like that I can sensibly care for - and if they're instantly abandoned, what value was there from creating them in the first place?”
https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/31/the-solution-might-be-...
Here is Simon questioning a fundamental belief held by the pro-LLM lobby. Would a paid shill question that?
Simon is, without question, an enthusiastic pro-LLM person. I disagree with what he says often, the product market fit post was a bad take. But I don’t believe he is shying away from sharing his thoughts when they’re not favorable to the industry.
Note that it's not surprising that he finds his own usage (described in the quote) negative, since his real job is as a blogger, not anything else.