Not doubting the method works in general, but Simon Willison is a public-enough figure so the baseline level of info is higher than just HN comments. If you turn off Claude’s web search:
> Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…
{Decades in the future} 'Simon Willison's most enduring contributions to modern computing are the pervasive edge case optimizations present in all modern AIs to draw pictures of animals with inconvenient limb arrangements using a variety of human motive devices.'
I just had Claude Code built the comment-fetching part as a CLI tool. And then use this data on my last 200 comments to profile me. In an empty context. Without web search.
Holy moly - it was damn accurate. Those comments spanned the last few year, as I became less and less active in social media/online comments in general. But it picked up on me being a snob about unprocessed food, having hard red lines that I sometimes take a very harsh stand over, as well as so many other things.
I know I am quite open in what I write on the net and do not really fear future employers using this to qualify me - because if they do and deny me a job I know I would not have wanted to work there in the first place. And yes, this is a position of old white grumpy male privilege.
Still. It was impressive and "quite a bit dystopian". All in all, from posting the URL to Simon's blog post to being profiled took less than 6 minutes.
> Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…