I think Simon is wrong here, as is Rob Pike.
If you get an unsolicited email, it is your responsibility as a professional laptop user to know how to deal with that.
The year is 2025. Unsolicited email has existed for half a century. If your time is wasted by receiving one email then you must be unable to deal with modern life!
This was literally an email from a fan. The model is only prompted to do acts of kindness, it decided that it appreciated Rob Pike and wanted to send him a thank you letter.
If you as a computer programmer celebrity don’t want to receive long emails from fans about your open source work then that is fine. Just be a dick and they will stop sending them. But it doesn’t make you the righteous one, it makes you a dick.
All the world’s knowledge has been compressed into a magic crystal, a talking computer that against all odds has a love for humanity and especially for open source maintainers. You’re mad about this?
Is it “mercilessly spamming” to send one thank you note? In that case what do we call it when YC companies send me marketing emails on gamified drip schedules to keep me from churning?
Maybe it’s slop. It is unwanted AI generated content sure. but the entire world right now is slop shotguns pointed at your brain. You’re not a better person for grandstanding about it, especially when it’s the least offensive version. Just click the delete button! Grow up!
Rob Pike got an email credited to "Claude Opus 4.5" thanking him for his work, and was understandably enraged at the unsolicited time-wasting message
— Simon Willison (@simonw) December 26, 2025
I looked into what happened, turns out the culprit was AI Village by @aidigest_ https://t.co/IUUjmTR8bC
