Search: “simon-willison”

Release: datasette 1.0a31 Another significant alpha release, with two new headline features. Datasette now offers users with the necessary permissions the ability to both execute write queries against

Here's an extended edit of the quote that includes a following fragment where Andrew Macdonald called the trade 'harder to justify' - full, unedited transcript is here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/

Simon Willison expresses skepticism about reports claiming Uber overspent on AI and was disappointed with the results, indicating he investigated the story and found issues with its accuracy or framin

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

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. My favourite thing about it is this note in the release announcement: Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor. Ther

Release: llm-anthropic 0.25.1 New model: Claude Opus 4.8 (claude-opus-4.8). New -o fast 1 option for fast mode, for organizations with that feature enabled on their account. Default max_tokens for eac

Tool: markdown-svg-renderer A slightly customized Markdown rendering tool with special treatment for fenced code SVG blocks - it both renders the image and provides a tab for switching to the code vie

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/

Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staf

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

sqlite AGENTS.md SQLite gained an AGENTS.md file five days ago - but it's not intended for their own development, it's presumably aimed at people who are pointing agents at the SQLite codebase. It inc

Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files The biggest challenge in designing agentic systems continues to be preventing them from enabling attackers to exfiltrate data. In this case Microsoft Copilot

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-

I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ev

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize somethin

The pressure Daniel Stenberg on the unprecedented level of pressure the curl team are facing right now thanks to the deluge of (credible) AI-assisted security issues being reported. The rate of incomi

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

California Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, California Sea Lion, Harbor Seal, in San Mateo County, CA, USWe took our new folding kayak out in the harbor and saw sea lions and harbor seals chilling on the d

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

Dropped this morning by the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. This is a very interesting document. It's

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

Release: datasette 1.0a30 The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable 'Jump to...' menu, described in detail in The extensible 'Jump to' menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4 Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this 'Start a new agent chat' interface as

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database ta

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Co

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clan

On the <dl> I learned a few new-to-me things about the <dl> element from this article by Ben Meyer: A <dt> can be followed by multiple <dd> You can optionally group the <dt> and <dd> elements in a <di

FTC to Require Cox Media Group, Two Other Firms to Pay Nearly $1 Million to Settle Charges They Deceived Customers About “Active Listening” AI-Powered Marketing Service Back in 2024 Cox Media Group we

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

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics David Oks provides the clearest explanation I've seen yet of why consumer products that use memory are likely to get significantly mo

We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent, a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent repre

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a3 'View SQL query' buttons for both visible tables and collapsed SQL result tool calls. Don't display empty reasoning chunks Improved handling of truncated responses - tab

datasette-agent-charts adds charts to Datasette Agent, powered by Observable Plot. The plugin extends Datasette Agent, which provides a conversational interface for asking questions about data in Data

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-

Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1 More color! Bar and waffle charts without a color column are shaded by magnitude with a sequential color scheme; color columns holding text values use the observa

It's hard to find much to write about Google I/O this year because I have a policy of not writing about anything that I can't try out myself, and a lot of the big announcements are 'coming soon'. I ac