Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 1mo ago
tencent/Hy3
tencent/Hy3 New Apache 2.0 licensed model from Tencent in China: Hy3 is a 295B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with 21B active parameters and 3.8B MTP layer parameters, developed by the Tencent Hy Team. Following the Hy3 Preview launch in late April, we gathered…
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sqlite-utils 4.0rc3
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc3 I hoped to release sqlite-utils 4.0 stable this weekend, but as I worked through the backlog of issues and PRs with a combination of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.5 the changelog since rc2 kept getting bigger . The biggest new feature is support for…
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sqlite-utils 4.0rc2
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc2 See sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25) .
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Building a World Map with only 500 bytes
Building a World Map with only 500 bytes Iwo Kadziela (assisted by Codex) figured out a way to generate a credible ASCII world map using 445 bytes of data: The key trick is to use deflate compression, which is then wired together using this neat snippet of JavaScript. I didn't…
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Better Models: Worse Tools
Better Models: Worse Tools Armin reports on a weird problem he ran into while hacking on Pi: The short version is that newer Claude models sometimes call Pi’s edit tool with extra, invented fields in the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit…
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Open Source AI Gap Map
Open Source AI Gap Map Current AI is "a global partnership building a public option for AI", founded as a non-profit at the AI Action Summit in Paris in February 2025 and backed by serious capital ($400m already committed). They launched their Gap Map a couple of days ago - an…
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Quoting Josh W. Comeau
I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch. It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year. There are likely a lot of reasons for…
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Fable's judgement
One of the most interesting tips I got from the Fireside Chat I hosted with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from the Claude Code team at AIE on Wednesday was to let Fable (and to a certain extent Opus) use their own judgement rather than dictating how they should work. The example…
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June 2026 newsletter
The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6, and US export restrictions GLM-5.2 is the new best open weights model Tokenmaxxing is so over…
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llm-coding-agent 0.1a0
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 started a new Python library using my python-lib-template-repository GitHub…
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Understand to participate
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 agents as they construct increasingly large and sophisticated changes, and the need…
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Quoting Anthropic
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. — Anthropic , on Twitter Tags: anthropic , claude , generative-ai , claude-mythos , ai ,…
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Nano Banana 2 Lite
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 used AI studio to run this prompt: Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where…
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What's new in Claude Sonnet 5
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 announcement post. Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is…
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The AI Compass
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 answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer",…
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HTML table extractor
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 into HTML, Markdown, CSV, TSV, or JSON. Try it out by selecting everything on…
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Quoting Jon Udell
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 recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box…
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Hack Your Summer
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 to build something real this summer. You’ll learn how to identify a project,…
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Quoting Dean W. Ball
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-release months that they are broadly available. After that period elapses, the…
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Quoting Timothy B. Lee
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 learning curve Tags: llms , ai , generative-ai
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Incident Report: CVE-2026-LGTM
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 bumping foxhole-lz4 , enter a disagreement loop over whether the package is…
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Quoting OpenAI
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 GPT‑5.5 while being 2x cheaper and Luna brings strong capability at our lowest…
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AI and Liability
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—and should be treated by the law as such. If a company hired human writers to…
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datasette-export-database 0.3a2
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 versions. It's now datasette>=1.0a27 instead. Tags: datasette
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simonw/browser-compat-db
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 data into a SQLite database. This new GitHub Repo includes a Claude Code for…
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Quoting Tom MacWright
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 purely LLM-generated commit messages. [...] My other reaction is that I don't…
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datasette 1.0a35
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 the /<database>/-/create JSON API . It can define columns, primary keys,…
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OPFS + Pyodide test harness
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 SQLite files stored on the user's computer. That's what OFPS (Origin Private…
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Prompt Injection as Role Confusion
Prompt Injection as Role Confusion First, I absolutely love this: This is a blog-style writeup of the paper. I wish every paper would come with one of these. Academic writing is pretty dry - the impact of a paper can be so much higher if you publish a readable version to…
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sqlite-utils 4.0rc1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 See sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions . Tags: sqlite-utils
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Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents
Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents The announcement says this is "for AI agents" but (as is pretty common these days) the AI hook isn't really necessary, this is an interesting feature for everyone else as well. Short version: you can now create a Cloudflare Workers…
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Quoting Sean Lynch
The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...] Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a…
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datasette-acl 0.6a0
Release: datasette-acl 0.6a0 This release expands datasette-acl from table-only permissions toward a general resource-sharing system. Alex Garcia did most of the work for this release - we're fleshing out the plugin that will allow multi-user Datasette instances finely grained…
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Quoting Charity Majors
What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down . Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully…
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<click-to-play> — a still that plays
Tool: <click-to-play> — a still that plays A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup: <click-to-play> <a href="URL to GIF"> <img src="URL to first frame" alt="..."> </a> </click-to-play> Into a still frame with a click to play button which loads the GIF on…
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NetNewsWire Status
NetNewsWire Status I find this inspiring. Brent Simmons retired a year ago, and his retirement project is making one piece of software really, really good - free from any commercial pressure. The software is NetNewsWire, first released in 2002 and made open source in 2018. I've…
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datasette 1.0a34
Release: datasette 1.0a34 Quoting the release notes: The big feature in this alpha is tools to insert, edit and delete rows within the Datasette interface. These features are available on table pages, and edit and delete are also available as action items on the row page. The…
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datasette-tailscale 0.1a0
Release: datasette-tailscale 0.1a0 A very experimental alpha plugin which lets you do this: datasette tailscale mydata.db \ --ts-authkey tskey-auth-xxxx --ts-hostname datasette-preview This starts a localhost Datasette server with a Tailscale sidecar that connects it to your…
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