Search: “simon-willison”

Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore. GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, a

@scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark: I feel like we need to stack these tests now I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the 'WHY ARE YOU LIK

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems.

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V

This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding i

Release: llm 0.31 New GPT-5.5 OpenAI model: llm -m gpt-5.5. #1418 New option to set the text verbosity level for GPT-5+ OpenAI models: -o verbosity low. Values are low, medium, high. New option for se

russellromney/honker 'Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics' for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It

Serving the For You feed One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom 'feed' implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom alg

The people do not yearn for automation This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket. It’s a

GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually

LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, us

[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will

Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they 100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing

Anthropic today quietly (as in silently, no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page, which shows up first for me on Google) to ad

As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 v

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model: Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previo

AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human orig

scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles I firmly approve of Steve Cosman's efforts to pollute the training set of pelicans riding bicycles. (To be fair, most of the examples I've published count as poisoning

OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 today, their latest image generation model. On the livestream Sam Altman said that the leap from gpt-image-1 to gpt-image-2 was equivalent to jumping from GPT-3 to G

Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them. As far as I can tel

Release: llm-openrouter 0.6 llm openrouter refresh command for refreshing the list of available models without waiting for the cache to expire. I added this feature so I could try Kimi 2.6 on OpenRout

TIL: SQL functions in Google Sheets to fetch data from Datasette I put together some notes on patterns for fetching data from a Datasette instance directly into Google Sheets - using the importdata()

Headless everything for personal AI Matt Webb thinks headless services are about to become much more common: Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience for users than using services direct

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Here's an example of a deceptively short prompt that got a lot of work done in a single shot. First, some background. I send out a free Substack newsletter around once a

Research: Claude system prompts as a git timeline Anthropic publish the system prompts for Claude chat and make that page available as Markdown. I had Claude Code turn that page into separate files fo

Release: datasette 1.0a28 I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly:

This year's PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It's in Long Beach, Cal

Tool: datasette.io news preview The datasette.io website has a news section built from this news.yaml file in the underlying GitHub repository. The YAML format looks like this: - date: 2026-04-15 body

Release: llm-anthropic 0.25 New model: claude-opus-4.7, which supports thinking_effort: xhigh. #66 New thinking_display and thinking_adaptive boolean options. thinking_display summarized output is cur

For anyone who has been (inadvisably) taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning's two big model releases - Qwen3.6-35B-

Release: datasette 1.0a27 Two major changes in this new Datasette alpha. I covered the first of those in detail yesterday - Datasette no longer uses Django-style CSRF form tokens, instead using modern

Release: datasette-export-database 0.3a1 This plugin was using the ds_csrftoken cookie as part of a custom signed URL, which needed upgrading now that Datasette 1.0a27 no longer sets that cookie. Tags

Release: datasette-ports 0.3 A small update for my tool for helping me figure out what all of the Datasette instances on my laptop are up to. Show working directory derived from each PID Show the full

Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts. It's presented via the standard Gemini API using gemini-3.1-flash-tts-pr

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac

I think we will see some people employed (though perhaps not explicitly) as meat shields: people who are accountable for ML systems under their supervision. The accountability may be purely internal,

Zig 0.16.0 release notes: 'Juicy Main' Zig has really good release notes - comprehensive, detailed, and with relevant usage examples for each of the new features. Of particular note in the newly relea

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now The UK's AI Safety Institute recently published Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities, their own independent analysis of Claude Mythos

datasette PR #2689: Replace token-based CSRF with Sec-Fetch-Site header protection Datasette has long protected against CSRF attacks using CSRF tokens, implemented using my asgi-csrf Python library. T

Research: Exploring the new `servo` crate In Servo is now available on crates.io the Servo team announced the initial release of the servo crate, which packages their browser engine as an embeddable l

The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more a

The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power use

Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm: uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --wit

SQLite 3.53.0 SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me: ALTER TABLE can now add and

Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Forma

I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't. If