David Crawshaw's Prompt on Automated Software Updating
Anthropic
OpenAI
Simon Willison cites a prompt by David Crawshaw about setting up a nightly cron job to fetch upstream changes, rebase local changes, and verify the software works before replacing the current version. The quote is taken from Crawshaw's post 'Devtools must be open source'.
Simon Willison quotes David Crawshaw's prompt, dated 3rd August 2026, which suggests automating software updates with a nightly cron job. The job would fetch upstream changes to the software, rebase all local changes on top of the upstream, check that the software works as intended, and then replace the current version. This is from Crawshaw's piece 'Devtools must be open source'. The page also lists recent articles by Willison, including posts about creating a game using Claude Fable 5, a new release of LLM with support for reasoning traces and OpenAI Responses, and his renewed interest in Stateless MCP.
Source: Simon Willison —
original