Search: “simon-willison”

What's new in Claude Sonnet 5 Claude Sonnet 5 came out this morning. I always head straight for the 'what's new' developer docs because they tend to have more actionable information than the official

Tool: HTML table extractor Yet another in my growing collection of paste-conversion tools. This one accepts pasted rich text from browsers (with embedded HTML tables) and converts every detected table

Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding This is an interesting new open weights (MIT licensed) model, the first model release from DeepReinforce. [...] with variants including 9B Dense, 3

Hack Your Summer I learned about this initiative from DJ Patil this morning: It’s a 4-week, high-velocity production sprint for undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates who want

Human Agent in the loop I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recrui

Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM Spectacular hypothetical incident report by Andrew Nesbitt. Day 2, 16:00 UTC --- Two AI review agents from competing vendors, both attached to a downstream pull request

This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics: Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-re

We're beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to

This is like saying there's no learning curve to being a manager because your employees will just do whatever you tell them to do. — Timothy B. Lee, on the idea that LLMs take no skill and have no lea

What happened after 2,000 people tried to hack my AI assistant Fernando Irarrázaval ran a challenge on hackmyclaw.com to see if anyone could leak secrets held by his OpenClaw test instance by sending

AI and Liability Bruce Schneier on the recent German ruling that Google be held liable for errors introduced in their AI overviews: AI agents are agents of the person or organization that deploys them

Release: datasette-export-database 0.3a2 An embarrassingly tiny release. The pyproject.toml had pinned to datasette==1.0a27, inadvertently making this plugin incompatible with all other Datasette vers

In the last few months, I've started to see [job applications] that were clearly cowritten by an LLM, link to an LLM-generated portfolio site, which then links to LLM-generated GitHub projects, with p

simonw/browser-compat-db Inspired by Mozilla's new MDN MCP service - source code here - I decided to try converting their comprehensive mdn/browser-compat-data repository full of browser compatibility

Release: datasette 1.0a35 I'll write more about this one tomorrow, but it's a big release. Three highlights from the release notes: New 'Create table' interface in the database actions menu, backed by

Tool: OPFS + Pyodide test harness I've been pondering if Datasette Lite - the Python Datasette application run entirely in the browser using Pyodide and WebAssembly - might be able to edit persistent

This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance, describing a small but effective inpainting model - a model where you can mark region

sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python's default sqlite3 package, including

Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents The announcement says this is 'for AI agents' but (as is pretty common these days) the AI hook isn't really necessary, this is an interesting feature for ev

The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...] Maybe the idealized form

Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude Big scoop for Maxwell Zeff at Wired: “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them

Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await con

DiffusionGemma Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Goog

If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know Jonathon Ready highlights one of the more eyebrow-raising details from the 319 page system card for Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Here's a longer excerpt,

Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement: The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI But everyone else should have access to it. By de

I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast. It's slow,

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything

TIL: Setting a custom price for a model in AgentsView I've been really enjoying AgentsView by Wes McKinney as a tool for exploring my token usage across different coding agents running on my laptop. C

Given how badly burned anyone who took Apple's 2024 WWDC Apple Intelligence announcements at face value was, I'm holding to a strict 'I'll believe it when I see it' policy for everything they announce

Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL qu

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a2 I added a CLI to micropython-wasm (issue #7), inspired by the first draft of the blog entry when I realized it would be a great way to illustrate the Try it yourself se

I've been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics I've been lookin

OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode OpenAI first teased this in February, but now it's live and 'rolling out to eligible personal accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business ac

We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...] A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...]

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that 'it's critical that we

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would ha

California Brown Pelican, in Fort Mason, CA, USI'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behi

Release: datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0 I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a0 My latest sandboxing experiment: This alpha package bundles a lightly customized WASM build of MicroPython with a wrapper to execute code in it via wasmtime. Tags: pyth

micropython-wasm 0.1a1 is a Python library for running a MicroPython sandbox using WebAssembly . This alpha release includes fixes for limitations discovered while building datasette-agent-micropython

Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to 'select early partners') and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, 'purpose-built for GitHub Cop

Tool: Pasted File Editor I really like how you can paste a large volume of text into claude.ai (or the Claude desktop/mobile apps) and it will detect it as a large paste and turn it into a file attach

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked I had trouble believing this story was true, but I've seen it verified from multiple sources now: One vid

I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Al got expensive, and Anthropic had

Release: datasette 1.0a32 A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was exper