Search: “simon-willison”

I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast. It's slow,

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything

TIL: Setting a custom price for a model in AgentsView I've been really enjoying AgentsView by Wes McKinney as a tool for exploring my token usage across different coding agents running on my laptop. C

Given how badly burned anyone who took Apple's 2024 WWDC Apple Intelligence announcements at face value was, I'm holding to a strict 'I'll believe it when I see it' policy for everything they announce

Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL qu

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a2 I added a CLI to micropython-wasm (issue #7), inspired by the first draft of the blog entry when I realized it would be a great way to illustrate the Try it yourself se

I've been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics I've been lookin

OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode OpenAI first teased this in February, but now it's live and 'rolling out to eligible personal accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business ac

We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...] A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...]

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that 'it's critical that we

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would ha

California Brown Pelican, in Fort Mason, CA, USI'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behi

Release: datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0 I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a0 My latest sandboxing experiment: This alpha package bundles a lightly customized WASM build of MicroPython with a wrapper to execute code in it via wasmtime. Tags: pyth

micropython-wasm 0.1a1 is a Python library for running a MicroPython sandbox using WebAssembly . This alpha release includes fixes for limitations discovered while building datasette-agent-micropython

Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to 'select early partners') and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, 'purpose-built for GitHub Cop

Tool: Pasted File Editor I really like how you can paste a large volume of text into claude.ai (or the Claude desktop/mobile apps) and it will detect it as a large paste and turn it into a file attach

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked I had trouble believing this story was true, but I've seen it verified from multiple sources now: One vid

I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Al got expensive, and Anthropic had

Release: datasette 1.0a32 A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was exper

Anthropic defines “run-rate revenue” in two parts. Use the last 28 days of sales ⁠from customers charged on a consumption basis and multiply it by 13. Then, multiply the monthly subscription take by 1

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription I find this post by David Wilson very relatable. David lists 16+ projects he's spun up with AI tooling, and concludes: I didn't mean to build most o

How we contain Claude across products A complaint I often have about sandboxing products is that they are rarely thoroughly documented, and in the absence of detailed documentation it's hard to know h

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, star

Research: Running Python ASGI apps in the browser via Pyodide + a service worker Datasette Lite is my version of Datasette that runs entirely in the browser using Pyodide in WebAssembly. When I first

The most interesting thing about Anthropic's 65B Series H announcement is this line (emphasis mine): Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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