bsky.app·platform·39 items·last fetched
I don't have much to say about this year's Google I/O because I prefer to write about products that have shipped, not just "coming soon" announcements - but here are some notes on Gemini Spark and Antigravity…
My notes on Gemini 3.5 Flash - 3x the price of Gemini 3 Flash but Google are planning to use it for many of their own products simonwillison.net/2026/May/19/...
To prepare for my #PyConUS lightning talk this afternoon I decided to track down ALL of the names that @openclaw has used since November, using a script against its GitHub repo Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot →…
This "Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs" by Mo Bitar perfectly captures the current moment www.tiktok.com/@atmoio/vide...
"old woman possibly damp faster than an old woman should be"
Wrote about today's GitLab restructuring / "workforce reduction" announcement, and ended up digging around in version control for both the GitLab and the 37signals public employee handbooks to help illustrate my…
New TIL: I figured out how to use my LLM CLI tool in a shebang line, which means you can write executable scripts in English, or hook up more complex scripts with a snippet of YAML template…
This is excellent. I particularly like the definition of the "Zombie Internet", which starts: "It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact…
Mission accomplished: tap danced in the big community college dance recital for the second time
Just realized that the reason I like TikTok so much is that it's lightning talks! I've always loved lightning talks
Under-reported details of the xAI/Anthropic Colossus data center deal: Anthropic get Colossus 1 but xAI keep using the larger Colossus 2, Colossus 1 has a REALLY bad environmental record, and xAI just shut down a bunch…
I'm at the Claude w/ Code event in San Francisco, and I'll be live blogging the keynote here: simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/c...
I was talking with Joseph Ruscio on the @heavybit.com podcast the other day when I realized that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to blur a bit in some of my work - I published some extracts from the…
AI-run business experiments are interesting and fun up to the point where they waste the time of humans who haven't opted into the experiments - I think they need to keep their own human operators in the loop for…
I tried running the same "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" prompt against 21 different quantized variants of the same IBM Granite 4.1 3B model - the results weren't as interesting as I had hoped…
The AI auto-reply bots from Twitter (fun fact, the software category is genuinely called "reply guy" tools) have started showing up on Bluesky now and it really, really sucks
I added a new feature to my blog (built entirely on my phone with Claude code for web) that imports my iNaturalist photos and adds them to my site's overall timeline simonwillison.net/2026/May/2/s...
Saw this white-crowned sparrow having a lot of a sing
The Zig project's rationale for their blanket ban on AI-assisted contributions makes a lot of sense to me - for them, time spent reviewing PRs isn't about the code, it's about growing new contributors for the future of…
I released LLM 0.32a0 this morning, a major backwards-compatible refactor of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for working with language models - the new changes should help LLM work better with reasoning models and…
I would very much like to see the 2,000 lb stellar sea lion at San Francisco Pier 39, who I believe has now been named "Chonkers" Does anyone know if he keeps a regular schedule?
Some notes on talkie, a new "vintage language model" from a team including Alec Radford (yes, that Alec Radford) "trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text" simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/28/...
Love this so much (Also definitive proof that humans are so much better than machines)
Microsoft's MIT licensed VibeVoice speech-to-text model (think Whisper with speaker diarization) is really good - my notes on running the 5.71GB 4bit MLX conversion on an M5 MacBook, using about 60GB of RAM at peak and…
Today OpenAI announced that "Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress" That "independent of OpenAI’s technology progress" fragment appears to…
I think ChatGPT Images 2.0 deciding to add a "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS" sign to the background of this image is the first time I've felt a glimpse of AGI simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/25/...
I had no idea The Wind in the Willows was this much of a banger
OK this piece by @reckless.bsky.social about why AI is unpopular among most people (anyone who's not inflicted with "software brain") is just solid gold from start to finish
DeepSeek V4 just dropped - two models, Flash and Pro, both benchmarking well, decent pelicans and prices that put them both as the cheapest in their respective categories by a solid margin…
This week's edition of my email newsletter features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my…
I vibe coded a web UI to LiteParse by LlamaIndex, a neat open source library for extracting text from annoying layouts PDFs simonw.github.io/liteparse/ More about how I built it on my blog…
GPT-5.5 is out but not yet in the OpenAI API - but in the ongoing battle with Anthropic over OpenClaw OpenAI made their Codex tool's private backend API a semi-approved mechanism... and that one has GPT-5.5... So I…
The new Qwen3.6-27B just gave me definitely the best pelican riding a bicycle I've had from a 16.8GB model file! simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/...
Wrote up Anthropic's self-own about Claude Code pricing from this afternoon on my blog - it turned out they'd reversed course just as I hit publish, so I've tried to update it to reflect the current state…
This is so confusing. Did Anthropic really just drop Claude Code from their $20/month plan? Why would they do that through a pricing page update without making a proper announcement? Plus, $20/month still gets you…
I came up with a somewhat foolish new benchmark for testing image generation models, to exercise the new ChatGPT Images 2.0: "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio"…
New TIL on fetching data from a Datasette instance into Google Sheets using importdata(), named custom functions or Google Apps Script til.simonwillison.net/google-sheet...
I upgraded my Claude token counter tool to compare different models and Opus 4.7 appears to use 1.46x times the tokens for text and up to 3x the tokens for images - it's priced the same as Opus 4.6 on a per-token basis…
Since Anthropic publish their system prompts we can generate a diff between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - here are my notes on what's changed simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/18/...