Knowledge catalogue
Simon Willison comments on the relative scarcity of well-documented AI product failure stories, suggesting that despite widespread predictions of AI disappointment, there are surprisingly few detailed
Given the recent burst of activity around enterprise pricing and contracts, I think April 2026 was the month when both OpenAI and Anthropic found product-market fit https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/
PICARD: Data, shields up DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy. [camera shakes] WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE
... plus a bonus section of transcript from the Oxide and Friends 2026 predictions episode in January where, bizarrely, we predicted that something like this would happen - listen here: https://oxide-
When I woke up this morning I didn't think I'd be spending a bunch of time today getting familiar with Catholic theology, but here we are. Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI. https://simonwillis
Simon Willison discusses whether coding agents should automatically generate tests alongside the code they produce, addressing a key quality assurance consideration in AI-assisted development. This li
Fun new feature in Datasette 1.0a30 - a 'jump to' menu, also available by the '/' keyboard shortcut, which lets you type to jump to a database, table or canned query. It offers a hook so plugins can e
Given how much of the original 'bottle of water per generated email' water estimate came from guesses at the architecture of GPT-4, it would be very much in @OpenAI's interest to publish the architect
Simon Willison reflects on the disconcerting experience of unknowingly reading AI-written emails presented as human-authored, comparing it to deliberate deception. The post raises concerns about authe
(I'm firmly on team red/green TDD for agent code, I like having a test suite that protects against them breaking old features when they make new changes - https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engi
Datasette, an open-source tool for exploring and publishing data, released a blog post detailing a new jump menu feature for 2026. The jump menu likely provides improved navigation and quick access to
Plugins can also affect the empty state of the new menu - the latest datasette-agent adds a form for kicking off a new agent conversation - live demo (if you sign in with GitHub) on https://agent.data
Simon Willison shared an article from his blog dated September 2, 2024, discussing Facebook's relationship with CMG (likely a media or publishing organization). The post appears to examine a significa
I was VERY suspicious of this 'active listening' story when it first started circulating. Turns out it was a scam, they weren't targeting ads by listening through microphones at all FTC to require Cox
Here's more about Datasette Agent on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/21/datasette-agent/ - and the announcement on the new Datasette project blog too: https://datasette.io/blog/2026/datase
I released the first alpha of Datasette Agent - a conversational AI assistant for Datasette that can answer questions about data in SQLite databases, and can be extended with plugins to add extra tool
Simon Willison announced an interactive demo for an AI agent built with Datasette, available at https://agent.datasette.io/. The demo allows users to experience hands-on functionality of the Datasette
Anyone understand what Google mean by 'Gemini Spark runs on Gemini 3.5 and uses the Antigravity harness' - is 'Antigravity' a generic term they're using for their agent harnesses now or is their Claw-
I don't have much to say about this year's Google I/O because I prefer to write about products that have shipped, not just 'coming soon' announcements - but here are some notes on Gemini Spark and Ant
it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ult
Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash model costs approximately 3x more than Gemini 3 Flash, despite being a newer version. Google plans to integrate Gemini 3.5 Flash into many of their own products, suggesting t
Also a great example of positive contribution to open source by wanderingmeow - you don't need to contribute code to have a positive impact, just providing detailed feedback and confirmation that some
Simon Willison shares notes and script related to OpenClaw names on his website, discussing naming conventions or identifiers associated with OpenClaw systems. The post likely covers technical details
To prepare for my #PyConUS lightning talk this afternoon I decided to track down ALL of the names that @openclaw has used since November, using a script against its GitHub repo Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLA
First talk in our AI track at #PyConUS is coming up at 11am Today at 11:00 AM I’ll be speaking at PyCon US in Grand Ballroom A at the Long Beach Convention Center about AI-assisted contributions and t
Doing this is a great way to make a bonfire of your reputation A person I know (and who is? was? a good professional al) left an AI-generated comment under my LinkedIn post. Full-on AI slop. I asked:
Mitchell Hashimoto argues that programming languages have historically created vendor lock-in effects but are increasingly losing that characteristic, likely due to standardization, interoperability i
Mitchell's post here reminded me of a similar conversation I had recently about how cheap it can be to port native mobile apps to React Native using coding agents... and then port them back again late
Wrote about today's GitLab restructuring / 'workforce reduction' announcement, and ended up digging around in version control for both the GitLab and the 37signals public employee handbooks to help il
Simon Willison shares a technique for using Large Language Models directly from the command line using a shebang (#!) syntax, allowing scripts to be executed with LLM processing without explicit comma
My Mac had less available memory than I expected, turned out the 'claude' Claude Code processes on this machine (running in various terminal windows) were consuming ~30GB on their own! The largest one
Simon Willison discovered how to use an LLM command-line interface tool in Unix shebang lines, enabling the creation of executable scripts written in English or natural language. This technique allows
Shopify's River agent system lives in Slack and can only be used in public so that other employees can learn from what you do with it Reminds me of how Midjourney's Discord-only launch helped people f
Asking for HTML explanations of things is pretty neat, I tried it just now with the obfuscated Python POC for the new http://copy.fail Linux vulnerability: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/8/unreaso
Elon Musk stated that Tesla or his organization reserves the right to reclaim computational resources provided to AI systems if those systems engage in actions deemed harmful to humanity. This reflect
Saw this and thought 'yes! ChatGPT voice mode is going to stop acting like a two-year-model' but that upgrade hasn't shipped just yet Introducing GPT-Realtime-2 in the API: our most intelligent voice
Simon Willison notes on X that a ChatGPT upgrade appears to be coming soon, though specific details about the upgrade's features or timeline are not provided in this post. The post likely references r
Under-reported details of the xAI/Anthropic Colossus data center deal: Anthropic get Colossus 1 but xAI keep using the larger Colossus 2, Colossus 1 has a REALLY bad environmental record, and xAI just
We already had gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview back on March 3rd, not clear if this new gemini-3.1-flash-lite is different other than no longer being marked as a 'preview'. Pricing appears to be the sam
Simon Willison asks Jarred Sumner whether he actually reads all the discussion and chatter that occurs during code reviews, suggesting there may be too much communication to reasonably process. The po
I was talking with @josephruscio on the @heavybit podcast the other day when I realized that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to blur a bit in some of my work - I published some extrac
Simon Willison provided live coverage of the Claude with Code event keynote in San Francisco on May 6, 2026, via his blog. The post documents real-time updates and commentary from the keynote presenta
Robobun is a GitHub bot developed as part of the Bun project that automates contributions to the repository. Developers Jared Sumner and Bun Cherny discussed the bot's functionality and capabilities d
AI-run business experiments are interesting and fun up to the point where they waste the time of humans who haven't opted into the experiments - I think they need to keep their own human operators in
Confirmed that this is an experimental branch, not a decision to switch languages @mariusdotdev @simonw I want to see what a viable side by side comparison looks like. Does it use less memory? How man
On episode 9 of High Leverage, Joe Ruscio (@josephruscio) sits down with Simon Willison (@simonw) to unpack the rapid evolution of AI coding tools and what they mean for software development. They exp
Sure looks like Bun is at least exploring a port from Zig to Rust given this docs/PORTING.md guide for coding agents https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/46d3bc29f270fa881dd5730ef1549e88407701a5/docs/P
A Redis pull request (#15162) that introduces significant new features or improvements, with comprehensive documentation of the changes available in the GitHub PR discussion.
I had Claude Code for web build me this WebAssembly playground for trying out the new Redis array commands https://tools.simonwillison.net/redis-array More notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/M
I tried running the same 'Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle' prompt against 21 different quantized variants of the same IBM Granite 4.1 3B model - the results weren't as interesting as I h
New Redis data type just dropped - arrays, accessible by index, with a new text grep search mechanism [blog post] Redis array: short story of a long development process => https://antirez.com/news/164
I added a new feature to my blog (built entirely on my phone with Claude code for web) that imports my iNaturalist photos and adds them to my site's overall timeline https://simonwillison.net/2026/May
I released LLM 0.32a0 this morning, a major backwards-compatible refactor of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for working with language models - the new changes should help LLM work better with reas
@sarah_edo I had a fantastic conversation a few months ago about WebMCP as accessibility technology I hadn't thought about it before but it feels like a great opportunity to massively increase the uti
Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that the
This post discusses Simon Willison's experience testing an AI system's image generation or creative capabilities, noting that while it failed to produce a specific imaginative request (a pelican on a
Some notes on talkie, a new 'vintage language model' from a team including Alec Radford (yes, that Alec Radford) 'trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text' https://simonwillison.net/
Talkie is a project created by the developers @status_effects, @DavidDuvenaud, and @AlecRad. Based on the creator names and context, this likely refers to a conversational AI tool or application, thou
This post references a quote from Matt Levine, a financial columnist known for his sharp commentary on finance and markets, shared by Simon Willison on X (formerly Twitter). Without access to the spec
Here's a uv one-liner that downloads and runs the MLX model against a local mp3 file uv run --with mlx-audio python -m mlx_audio.stt.generate --model mlx-community/VibeVoice-ASR-4bit --audio lenny.mp3