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Simon Willison's Weblog 21h ago 1 min read
llm-gemini 0.31

Release: llm-gemini 0.31 gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview. Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview mo

Simon Willison's Weblog 22h ago 1 min read
Big Words

Tool: Big Words I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick

Simon Willison's Weblog 23h ago 1 min read
Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabil

Simon Willison's Weblog 1d ago 2 min read
Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use all of the capacity of their

Simon Willison's Weblog 1d ago 1 min read
GitHub Repo Stats

Tool: GitHub Repo Stats One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site lay

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 1 min read
Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026

I'm at Anthropic's Code w/ Claude event today. Here's my live blog of the morning keynote sessions. Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, claude-code, live-blog

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 6 min read
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit's High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my highlights, including my

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 1 min read
datasette-referrer-policy 0.1

Release: datasette-referrer-policy 0.1 The OpenStreetMap tiles on the Datasette global-power-plants demo weren't displaying correctly. This turned out to be caused by two bugs. The first is th

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 2 min read
Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm

Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm Andon Labs previously started an AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Now they're running a similar experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, only this time it's a cafe. The

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
datasette-llm 0.1a7

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a7 Mechanism for configuring default options for specific models. Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to c

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
llm-echo 0.5a0

Release: llm-echo 0.5a0 New -o thinking 1 option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher. This plugin provides a fake model called echo for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's us

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
Quoting John Gruber

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows seve

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. Granite 4.1 LLMs: How They’re Built by Gr

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
Quoting Andy Masley

[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. No

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
April 2026 newsletter

I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: Opus 4.7 and GPT

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo

Research: TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little m

Simon Willison's Weblog 4d ago 1 min read
Redis Array Playground

Tool: Redis Array Playground Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis. The new commands are ARCOUNT, ARDEL, ARDELRANGE, ARGET, ARGETRANGE, ARGREP, ARINFO

Simon Willison's Weblog 5d ago 1 min read
Quoting Anthropic

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ide

Simon Willison's Weblog 6d ago 1 min read
Sightings

/elsewhere/sightings/ I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype

Simon Willison's Weblog 6d ago 1 min read
iNaturalist Sightings

Tool: iNaturalist Sightings I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/30/2026 1 min read
Codex CLI 0.128.0 adds /goal

Codex CLI 0.128.0 adds /goal The latest version of OpenAI's Codex CLI coding agent adds their own version of the Ralph loop: you can now set a /goal and Codex will keep on looping until it evaluates t

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/30/2026 1 min read
Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities

Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities The UK's AI Security Institute previously evaluated Claude Mythos: now they've evaluated GPT-5.5 for finding security vulnerability and found it t

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/30/2026 1 min read
Quoting Andrew Kelley

It's a common misconception that we can't tell who is using LLM and who is not. I'm sure we didn't catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fun

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/30/2026 1 min read
We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps

We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps Matt Webb: I would love an RSS web feed for all those various tools and apps pages, each item with an “Install” button. (But install to where?) The le

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/30/2026 2 min read
The Zig project's rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policy

Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. En

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/29/2026 1 min read
llm 0.32a1

Release: llm 0.32a1 Fixed a bug in 0.32a0 where tool-calling conversations were not correctly reinflated from SQLite. #1426 Tags: llm

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/29/2026 6 min read
LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor

I just released LLM 0.32a0, an alpha release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing LLMs, with some consequential changes that I've been working towards for quite a while. Previous versio

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/29/2026 1 min read
llm 0.32a0

Release: llm 0.32a0 See the annotated release notes. Tags: llm

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/28/2026 1 min read
Quoting OpenAI Codex base_instructions

Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. — OpenAI Codex base_instruct

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/28/2026 1 min read
Quoting Matthew Yglesias

Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that the

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/28/2026 1 min read
What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns!

What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns! Richard Si describes an excellent set of upgrades to Python's default pip tool for installing dependencies. This version drops support for

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/28/2026 3 min read
Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 New project from Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (of GPT, GPT-2, Whisper fame). talkie-1930-13b-base (53.1 GB) is a 13B languag

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/27/2026 2 min read
microsoft/VibeVoice

microsoft/VibeVoice VibeVoice is Microsoft's Whisper-style audio model for speech-to-text, MIT licensed and with speaker diarization built into the model. Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 b

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/27/2026 3 min read
Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause

For many years, Microsoft and OpenAI's relationship has included a weird clause saying that, should AGI be achieved, Microsoft's commercial IP rights to OpenAI's technology would be null and void. Tha

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/27/2026 1 min read
Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices

Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices I just encountered this feature via a try this out now prompt in a Google Meet meeting. It kind-of worked! This is Google's imple

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/25/2026 1 min read
WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

@scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark: I feel like we need to stack these tests now I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the WHY ARE YOU L

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/25/2026 1 min read
Quoting Romain Huet

Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore. GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, a

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/25/2026 1 min read
GPT-5.5 prompting guide

GPT-5.5 prompting guide Now that GPT-5.5 is available in the API, OpenAI have released a wealth of useful tips on how best to prompt the new model. Here's a neat trick they recommend for applications

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 1 min read
llm 0.31

Release: llm 0.31 New GPT-5.5 OpenAI model: llm -m gpt-5.5. #1418 New option to set the text verbosity level for GPT-5+ OpenAI models: -o verbosity low. Values are low, medium, high. New opt

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 2 min read
The people do not yearn for automation

The people do not yearn for automation This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket. It’s a

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 3 min read
DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 1 min read
Millisecond Converter

Tool: Millisecond Converter LLM reports prompt durations in milliseconds and I got fed up of having to think about how to convert those to seconds and minutes. Tags: tools

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 1 min read
It's a big one

This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding i

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 1 min read
russellromney/honker

russellromney/honker Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It l

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 1 min read
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems.

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/24/2026 1 min read
Serving the For You feed

Serving the For You feed One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom feed implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algor

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/23/2026 8 min read
Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web

LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, us

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/23/2026 3 min read
A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/23/2026 1 min read
llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0

Release: llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0 Hijacks your Codex CLI credentials to make API calls with LLM, as described in my post about GPT-5.5. Tags: openai, llm, codex-cli

Simon Willison's Weblog 4/23/2026 1 min read
Quoting Maggie Appleton

[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will