Knowledge catalogue
Sometimes they DO attempt to do that but guess the rationale incorrectly, which is worse than not adding no a rationale at all I do try to link commits back to issues though, which are written by me a
Tool: github-code Web Component An experimental Web Component built using GPT-5.5 and the following prompt: let's build a Web Component for embedding code from GitHub <github-code href='https://github
I had Claude Fable 5 run a final review of the release using this prompt and it kicked up another four release blockers! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/7/sqlite-utils-4/#claude-fable-5-helped-a-lo
I released sqlite-utils 4.0, the 124th release but the first major version bump since 3.0 back in 2020 I managed to keep things backwards-compatible all the way up to version 3.39 before the accumulat
Now I'm regretting having carefully blasted through 100% of my Fable allotment in time for being cut off at the end of today! (Presumably 'Wed 12:00 PM' means I get it back at noon on Wednesday, not a
Since this is a slightly backwards-incompatible change here's a detailed upgrade guide - which you can read, or feed into your coding agent and have it apply the upgrades for you https://sqlite-utils.
sqlite-migrate is a simple database migration system for SQLite, based on sqlite-utils. Version 0.2 represents sqlite-migrate as a database migrations system for SQLite, loosely inspired by Django mig
sqlite-utils 4.0 introduces three major new features: database migrations for schema evolution, nested transaction support via db.atomic(), and support for compound foreign keys. The release includes
This morning I released sqlite-utils 4.0, the 124th release of that project and the first major version bump since 3.0 in November 2020. In addition to some small but significant breaking changes (des
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc3 I hoped to release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but as I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 the changel
tencent/Hy3 New Apache 2.0 licensed model from Tencent in China: Hy3 is a 295B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 21B active parameters and 3.8B MTP layer parameters, developed by the Tence
Somewhat humbling to have Claude Fable do a final review of some software that you're about to release and have it then find (and fix) FIVE release blockers, for an estimated (unsubsidized) cost of $1
I wrote about the sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 release a couple of weeks ago. Since we only have Claude Fable on our Max subscriptions for a few more days, I decided to see if it could help me get to a 4.0 sta
Better Models: Worse Tools Armin reports on a weird problem he ran into while hacking on Pi: The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in
Building a World Map with only 500 bytes Iwo Kadziela (assisted by Codex) figured out a way to generate a credible ASCII world map using 445 bytes of data: The key trick is to use deflate compression,
'At least this felt ambitious until fable chewed through each of my requests like it was nothing...' @simonw I made this 3D video infographic explaining the AuthaGraph map projection, with population
One of the most interesting tips I got from the Fireside Chat I hosted with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from the Claude Code team at AIE on Wednesday was to let Fable (and to a certain extent Opus) use
I absolutely hate how I'm getting to be suspicious of ANY reply to my posts here, especially ones that pose a question, as they are so often from bot accounts If you're running a bot like this please
The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6, and US export rest
Simon Willison shares additional notes and commentary on his blog regarding judgment and decision-making processes. The post likely explores practical considerations or philosophical perspectives on h
Open Source AI Gap Map Current AI is 'a global partnership building a public option for AI', founded as a non-profit at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025 and backed by serious capital ($4
I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch. It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales a
Sent out my sponsors-only monthly newsletter for June, which means the May newsletter is now available here https://github.com/simonw/monthly-newsletter-archive/blob/main/2026-05-may.md - you can spon
The most interesting Fable tip I've heard so far is to let the model use its own judgement as much as possible I told it 'For all coding tasks use your judgement to decide an appropriate lower power m
Simon Willison discusses the relationship between understanding and participation, exploring how comprehension of a topic or system is fundamental to meaningful engagement or contribution. The blog po
I really like this 'understand to participate' framing of the cognitive debt problem when working with coding agents That's where another answer comes in: we can understand to participate. You can lea
I've been blogging a few of my Fable experiments today, most recently I had it more-or-less one-shot a CLI coding agent on top of my LLM Python library https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/2/llm-coding-
Release: llm-coding-agent 0.1a0 Another Fable 5 experiment. Now that my LLM library has evolved into more of an agent framework it's time to see what a simple coding agent would look like built on it.
I saw Geoffrey Litt speak at AIE yesterday, and one framing he used particularly resonated with me: Understand to participate Geoffrey was talking about the challenge of collaborating with coding agen
Research: Using DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts One of this morning's AIE keynotes covered dspy, which reminded me I've been meaning to see if it could help me improv
Simon Willison discusses an ambitious project involving Fable, likely covering current development priorities or technical challenges in the Fable programming language or related tools. The post appea
'You need a rich set of concepts in your mind to think creatively and fluently about how to move something forward.' It's never just one loop! A project is many, many loops with the agent. And the und
@_catwu @simonw and I will be doing a fireside chat about 'This year in Claude' from 12:30pm-1:30pm at AIE in Expo Stage 2. We'll be covering a really wide range of topics and I think it will be reall
shot-scraper video is a new command introduced in today's shot-scraper 1.10 release which accepts a storyboard.yml file defining a routine to run against a web application and uses Playwright to recor
I've added video support to my 'shot-scraper' browser automation tool - you (or your coding agent) can now create a storyboard YAML file and use that to record a video demo of new web application feat
Nano Banana 2 Lite Also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in their API), this is the 'fastest and cheapest Gemini image model, engineered for velocity and scale'. I use
Notes (and a Pelican) on Claude Sonnet 5 - the new tokenizer makes it ~1.4x more expensive for English, ~1.33x more expensive for Spanish but roughly the same price for Simplified Mandarin https://sim
shot-scraper is a command-line utility for taking automated screenshots of websites . It is designed primarily for documentation but also has scraping applications . The 1.10 release likely includes u
The AI Compass This political compass style quiz by bambamramfan is pretty neat - answer 29 questions about AI and AI ethics to see which of the 30 archetypes you best fit. I'm impressed that my answe
We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon. We’re grateful to
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
Is it just me, or are today's LLMs less likely to default to building everything in React than they were last year? I used to have to say 'don't use React' in almost all of my frontend web dev prompts
Not sure if that's a change in default preferences from the models or just that I'm often prompting inside existing projects and the models know full well not to introduce React to a project that isn'
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
This statement is a critical analogy about dismissing learning curves in technology or professional contexts. Simon Willison uses the comparison to highlight how unrealistic expectations—assuming empl
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
Also not a great advertisement for a sandboxing product: @daytonaio effectively saying they don't trust the security of their product enough to expose the source code When the competition for sandboxe
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
Update: it's fixed! @simonw @ClaudeDevs @claudeai This is fixed — the egress proxy was incorrectly blocking git/gh reads to public repos that weren't attached to the session. Clones/fetches work again
Claude Code for web just started saying 'GitHub is blocked by egress policy', which is a big problem for me because most of my prompts there start with things like 'clone simonw/sqlite-utils to /tmp t
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
This entry references a Claude.ai coding session shared by Simon Willison, a well-known technology writer and open source developer, likely demonstrating a practical example of using Claude's code int