Search: “simon-willison”

Sent out my sponsors-only monthly newsletter for June, which means the May newsletter is now available here https://github.com/simonw/monthly-newsletter-archive/blob/main/2026-05-may.md - you can spon

The most interesting Fable tip I've heard so far is to let the model use its own judgement as much as possible I told it 'For all coding tasks use your judgement to decide an appropriate lower power m

Simon Willison discusses the relationship between understanding and participation, exploring how comprehension of a topic or system is fundamental to meaningful engagement or contribution. The blog po

I really like this 'understand to participate' framing of the cognitive debt problem when working with coding agents That's where another answer comes in: we can understand to participate. You can lea

I've been blogging a few of my Fable experiments today, most recently I had it more-or-less one-shot a CLI coding agent on top of my LLM Python library https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/2/llm-coding-

Release: llm-coding-agent 0.1a0 Another Fable 5 experiment. Now that my LLM library has evolved into more of an agent framework it's time to see what a simple coding agent would look like built on it.

I saw Geoffrey Litt speak at AIE yesterday, and one framing he used particularly resonated with me: Understand to participate Geoffrey was talking about the challenge of collaborating with coding agen

Research: Using DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts One of this morning's AIE keynotes covered dspy, which reminded me I've been meaning to see if it could help me improv

Simon Willison discusses an ambitious project involving Fable, likely covering current development priorities or technical challenges in the Fable programming language or related tools. The post appea

'You need a rich set of concepts in your mind to think creatively and fluently about how to move something forward.' It's never just one loop! A project is many, many loops with the agent. And the und

@_catwu @simonw and I will be doing a fireside chat about 'This year in Claude' from 12:30pm-1:30pm at AIE in Expo Stage 2. We'll be covering a really wide range of topics and I think it will be reall

shot-scraper video is a new command introduced in today's shot-scraper 1.10 release which accepts a storyboard.yml file defining a routine to run against a web application and uses Playwright to recor

I've added video support to my 'shot-scraper' browser automation tool - you (or your coding agent) can now create a storyboard YAML file and use that to record a video demo of new web application feat

Nano Banana 2 Lite Also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in their API), this is the 'fastest and cheapest Gemini image model, engineered for velocity and scale'. I use

Notes (and a Pelican) on Claude Sonnet 5 - the new tokenizer makes it ~1.4x more expensive for English, ~1.33x more expensive for Spanish but roughly the same price for Simplified Mandarin https://sim

shot-scraper is a command-line utility for taking automated screenshots of websites . It is designed primarily for documentation but also has scraping applications . The 1.10 release likely includes u

The AI Compass This political compass style quiz by bambamramfan is pretty neat - answer 29 questions about AI and AI ethics to see which of the 30 archetypes you best fit. I'm impressed that my answe

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5. We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon. We’re grateful to

What's new in Claude Sonnet 5 Claude Sonnet 5 came out this morning. I always head straight for the 'what's new' developer docs because they tend to have more actionable information than the official

Tool: HTML table extractor Yet another in my growing collection of paste-conversion tools. This one accepts pasted rich text from browsers (with embedded HTML tables) and converts every detected table

Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding This is an interesting new open weights (MIT licensed) model, the first model release from DeepReinforce. [...] with variants including 9B Dense, 3

Hack Your Summer I learned about this initiative from DJ Patil this morning: It’s a 4-week, high-velocity production sprint for undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates who want

Human Agent in the loop I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recrui

Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM Spectacular hypothetical incident report by Andrew Nesbitt. Day 2, 16:00 UTC --- Two AI review agents from competing vendors, both attached to a downstream pull request

Is it just me, or are today's LLMs less likely to default to building everything in React than they were last year? I used to have to say 'don't use React' in almost all of my frontend web dev prompts

Not sure if that's a change in default preferences from the models or just that I'm often prompting inside existing projects and the models know full well not to introduce React to a project that isn'

This is a bad state of affairs. Consider, in particular, some industry dynamics: Frontier models are trained at an enormous cost, and a significant fraction of that cost is recouped in the few post-re

We're beginning a limited preview of the GPT‑5.6 series: Sol, our flagship model; Terra, a balanced model for everyday work; and Luna, a fast and affordable model. Terra has competitive performance to

This is like saying there's no learning curve to being a manager because your employees will just do whatever you tell them to do. — Timothy B. Lee, on the idea that LLMs take no skill and have no lea

This statement is a critical analogy about dismissing learning curves in technology or professional contexts. Simon Willison uses the comparison to highlight how unrealistic expectations—assuming empl

What happened after 2,000 people tried to hack my AI assistant Fernando Irarrázaval ran a challenge on hackmyclaw.com to see if anyone could leak secrets held by his OpenClaw test instance by sending

AI and Liability Bruce Schneier on the recent German ruling that Google be held liable for errors introduced in their AI overviews: AI agents are agents of the person or organization that deploys them

Also not a great advertisement for a sandboxing product: @daytonaio effectively saying they don't trust the security of their product enough to expose the source code When the competition for sandboxe

Release: datasette-export-database 0.3a2 An embarrassingly tiny release. The pyproject.toml had pinned to datasette==1.0a27, inadvertently making this plugin incompatible with all other Datasette vers

Update: it's fixed! @simonw @ClaudeDevs @claudeai This is fixed — the egress proxy was incorrectly blocking git/gh reads to public repos that weren't attached to the session. Clones/fetches work again

Claude Code for web just started saying 'GitHub is blocked by egress policy', which is a big problem for me because most of my prompts there start with things like 'clone simonw/sqlite-utils to /tmp t

In the last few months, I've started to see [job applications] that were clearly cowritten by an LLM, link to an LLM-generated portfolio site, which then links to LLM-generated GitHub projects, with p

This entry references a Claude.ai coding session shared by Simon Willison, a well-known technology writer and open source developer, likely demonstrating a practical example of using Claude's code int

simonw/browser-compat-db Inspired by Mozilla's new MDN MCP service - source code here - I decided to try converting their comprehensive mdn/browser-compat-data repository full of browser compatibility

... and now you can buy your own! https://happy-pelicans.printify.me/product/29480311 Proceeds go to http://birdrescue.org, a local non-profit that rescues pelicans (among other birds) I printed a cus

Release: datasette 1.0a35 I'll write more about this one tomorrow, but it's a big release. Three highlights from the release notes: New 'Create table' interface in the database actions menu, backed by

Tool: OPFS + Pyodide test harness I've been pondering if Datasette Lite - the Python Datasette application run entirely in the browser using Pyodide and WebAssembly - might be able to edit persistent

Pamela rocks https://x.com/pamelafox/status/2069183465501921605 By popular demand, here's a lil store where you can buy your own: https://happy-pelicans.printify.me/product/29480311 I will donate proc

This post highlights an interactive web-based demo of the Moebius model, which users can test directly in their browser with approximately 1.3GB of model data downloaded locally. The tool appears to b

Pamela Fox created a custom t-shirt design referencing Simon Willison's Pelican benchmark, a technical tool or metric in web development or performance testing. She posted about it on X (formerly Twit

My parallel agent side-project today was having Claude Code port the new Moebius image pinpointing model to ONNX in order to run it entirely in the browser https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/22/portin