Search: “simon-willison”

“11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase. If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing. — Boris Mann Tags: ai-agents, ai, agent-definiti

Release: datasette 1.0a29 New TokenRestrictions.abbreviated(datasette) utility method for creating '_r' dictionaries. #2695 Table headers and column options are now visible even if a table contains ze

Release: llm 0.32a2 A bunch of useful stuff in this LLM alpha, but the most important detail is this one: Most reasoning-capable OpenAI models now use the /v1/responses endpoint instead of /v1/chat/co

The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are peopl

Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey c

Learning on the Shop floor Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack: River does not respond to direct messages. She politely

Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance

GitLab Act 2 There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the 'workforce reduction' and 'structural and strategic decisions' they are making with respect to the agentic era. They're '

TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script Kim_Bruning on Hacker News: But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...] This inspired me to loo

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort

One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right no

This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that

WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions. wtf my dude WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conf

Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML Thought-provoking piece by Thariq Shihipar (on the Claude Code team at Anthropic) advocating for HTML over Markdown as an output format to req

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabil

Tool: Big Words I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page th

Tool: GitHub Repo Stats One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I b

Release: llm-gemini 0.31 gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview. Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has chang

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use 'all of the capacity of their

Simon Willison's live blog covers Anthropic's Code w/ Claude 2026 event, documenting the morning keynote sessions with real-time updates. The event featured announcements including updates to Claude m

I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit's High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my highlights, including my

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a7 Mechanism for configuring default options for specific models. Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to configure a m

Release: datasette-referrer-policy 0.1 The OpenStreetMap tiles on the Datasette global-power-plants demo weren't displaying correctly. This turned out to be caused by two bugs. The first is that the C

Release: llm-echo 0.5a0 New -o thinking 1 option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher. This plugin provides a fake model called 'echo' for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for w

Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm Andon Labs previously started an AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Now they're running a similar experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, only this time it's a cafe. The

I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: Opus 4.7 and GPT-

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. Granite 4.1 LLMs: How They’re Built by Gr

[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. No

Tool: Redis Array Playground Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis. The new commands are ARCOUNT, ARDEL, ARDELRANGE, ARGET, ARGETRANGE, ARGREP, ARINFO, ARINSER

Research: TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more deta

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ide

/elsewhere/sightings/ I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I

Tool: iNaturalist Sightings I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my phone us

Codex CLI 0.128.0 adds /goal The latest version of OpenAI's Codex CLI coding agent adds their own version of the Ralph loop: you can now set a /goal and Codex will keep on looping until it evaluates t

Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities The UK's AI Security Institute previously evaluated Claude Mythos: now they've evaluated GPT-5.5 for finding security vulnerability and found it t

It's a common misconception that we can't tell who is using LLM and who is not. I'm sure we didn't catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fun

Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. Eng

We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps Matt Webb: I would love an RSS web feed for all those various tools and apps pages, each item with an “Install” button. (But install to where?) The les

LLM 0.32a0 is an alpha release of Simon Willison's LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing large language models, featuring consequential architectural changes. The release includes two key chan

I just released LLM 0.32a0, an alpha release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing LLMs, with some consequential changes that I've been working towards for quite a while. Previous versio

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 New project from Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (of GPT, GPT-2, Whisper fame). talkie-1930-13b-base (53.1 GB) is a '13B langua

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

Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. — OpenAI Codex base_instruct

What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns! Richard Si describes an excellent set of upgrades to Python's default pip tool for installing dependencies. This version drops support for

microsoft/VibeVoice VibeVoice is Microsoft's Whisper-style audio model for speech-to-text, MIT licensed and with speaker diarization built into the model. Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 b

Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices I just encountered this feature via a 'try this out now' prompt in a Google Meet meeting. It kind-of worked! This is Google's imp