bsky.app·platform·87 items·last fetched
Ruff 0.16.0 - Astral's fast Python linter - came out a few days ago and increased the number of default-enabled rules from 59 to 413, which highlighted all sorts of problems across my projects (1618 in sqlite-utils…
I wrote about the completely wild incident where OpenAI were testing a new model and it broke out of its sandbox and broke INTO Hugging Face to steal the answers to the benchmark simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/...
San Francisco tip: it only costs around $15 ($10 in quarters plus a $5 bill for the self-playing violin) to activate every single Orchestrion in Musée Mécanique
Today at Pier 39 in San Francisco I learned that if you want to take a good photograph of a sea lion, you should aim to get their teeth
I interviewed Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from the Claude Code team at the AI engineer World's Fair a couple of weeks ago - the video is now out, so I've published an annotated transcript of our conversation…
I got a fun photo last night of a California Brown Pelican surrounded by Elegant Terns
If you have Claude Code installed you're running software that uses the new (unreleased) version of Bun that's been rewritten in Rust - here are two commands you can run to see that for yourself…
Suggestion for hyperscalers feeling pressure over data center water use: Buy up a few exclusive country clubs, convert the golf courses into public parks, pay for guides and binoculars to get the previous members into…
My notes on Kimi K3, plus some thoughts on what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark even while it becomes further detached from how good the models are at the things that matter (like agentic tool calling…
I poked around in the just open sourced Grok Build CLI tool - 844,000 lines of Rust code! - and dug up a few interesting highlights, including a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" that renders them…
Made myself a custom Codex pet today (you'll never guess what it was), and had some fun reverse-engineering how the feature works - it generates animated sprite sheets using gpt-image-2 simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/14/...
New TIL: Using uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly way I finally found a recipe that I like for running `uvx tool-name` in GitHub Actions without downloading a fresh copy of the package every time…
Trying to figure out the logistics of how you would go about nationalising Adele
The Vergecast continues to be so good - I learn a bunch of new things every time I listen to it, and the quality of the commentary is universally excellent Just listened to the latest episode about Netflix content…
Notes on GPT-5.6, which includes some interesting new additions to the API (programmatic tool calling and multi-agent in particular) - plus 18 pelicans for the 6 reasoning levels and 3 new models…
I released sqlite-utils 4.0, the 124th release but the first major version bump since 3.0 back in 2020 I managed to keep things backwards-compatible all the way up to version 3.39 before the accumulated design mistakes…
Somewhat humbling to have Claude Fable do a final review of some software that you're about to release and have it then find (and fix) FIVE release blockers, for an estimated (unsubsidized) cost of $149.25…
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 model and run that…
Sent out my sponsors-only monthly newsletter for June, which means the May newsletter is now available here github.com/simonw/month... - you can sponsor me through GitHub to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
TikTok just found me a carousel influencer and now I know that the American frog aka hop toad carousel creature was inspired by Mr Toad from the Wind in the Willows! www.tiktok.com/@amusementpa...
What's the most ambitious project you have Fable working on right now?
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…
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 features…
Looks like I'm my own patron saint!
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 simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/22/...
I just released the first release candidate for sqlite-utils v4, adding a migrations system (previously released independently as sqlite-migrate) and support for nested transactions: simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/21/...
Just launched Datasette Apps - a plugin for Datasette that lets you host full HTML+JS apps in an iframe sandbox that can query your database and do interesting things with your data simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/18/...
I see accounts posting stolen, uncredited 8 year old Reddit content are a thing on Bluesky too now www.reddit.com/r/aww/commen...
Posted 37 wildlife photos on my blog in June already and it's only the 17th (in UTC, the timezone of my blog) simonwillison.net/elsewhere/si...
Saw this pair of absolute dumplings on our walk today
It's now possible to compile Python extensions (C, C++, Rust etc) to WebAssembly and distribute them through PyPI such that Pyodide can install them directly simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/13/...
I got fed up of waiting for OpenAI to bring their much improved gpt-realtime-2 voice conversation model to the ChatGPT product, so I upgraded my OpenAI-WebRTC playground tool to use it and to let you paste in a…
After two days with Claude Fable 5 the best way I can describe it is "relentlessly proactive" - here's an example where I dropped in a screenshot of a bug and it span up custom CORS Python servers and used…
New Datasette release: 1.0a33, which finally brings documents the ?_extra= JSON API mechanism and brings it to the row and query pages in addition to the table pages (Most of the code in this release was built with the…
Wrote up my initial impressions of Claude Fable 5 - it has a big model smell: slow, expensive and capable of crunching through pretty much everything I threw at it simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/9/c...
A TIL on using agentsview.io to calculate token spending with Claude Fable 5 despite that model not yet being included in the AgentsView pricing database til.simonwillison.net/llms/agentsv...
I may have finally found the Python-in-a-sandbox solution I've been looking for... here's my latest experiment, this time running MicroPython in WebAssembly inside my Python applications simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/6/m...
Today on TikTok: Chinese truck selling thirst traps www.tiktok.com/@chenglongtr...
Today on TikTok: Chinese truck selling thirst traps www.tiktok.com/@chenglongtr...
Uber reportedly now caps coding agents at $1,500/month per employee per tool - seems sensible to me, but it's also an interesting hint at the value Uber thinks these tools are providing simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/3/u...
Hacker News has an alarmingly high tolerance for slop content these days It also has social norms against accusing something of being written with AI, which means the community has trouble strengthening its immune…
Anthropic's self-reported run-rate revenue growth is wild - Axios Jim VandeHei said he couldn't find "any company — in any industry, in any era — that has scaled organic revenue this quickly at this level as Anthropic"…
Notes on Claude Opus 4.8, which Anthropic call "a modest but tangible improvement" - plus pelicans riding bicycles for each of the five different thinking efforts simonwillison.net/2026/May/28/...
Given the recent burst of activity around enterprise pricing and contracts, I think April 2026 was the month when both OpenAI and Anthropic found product-market fit simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/...
When I woke up this morning I didn't think I'd be spending a bunch of time today getting familiar with Catholic theology, but here we are. Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI. simonwillison.net/2026/May/25/...
Fun new feature in Datasette 1.0a30 - a "jump to" menu, also available by the "/" keyboard shortcut, which lets you type to jump to a database, table or canned query. It offers a hook so plugins can extend it with…
@futurism.com important update to your story from September 2024 futurism.com/the-byte/fac... - the FTC just punished those companies for lying about how their technology works, they weren't listening through device…
I released the first alpha of Datasette Agent - a conversational AI assistant for Datasette that can answer questions about data in SQLite databases, and can be extended with plugins to add extra tools and features You…
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/...