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Simon Willison's Weblog 17h ago 1 min read
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 Tenc

Simon Willison's Weblog 1d ago 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 9 min read
sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25)

I wrote about the sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 release a couple of weeks ago. Since we only have Claude Fable on our Max subscriptions for a few more days, I decided to see if it could help me get to a 4.0 sta

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 1 min read
sqlite-utils 4.0rc2

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc2 See sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25).

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 2d ago 2 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
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 ($400

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 1 min read
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 a

Simon Willison's Weblog 3d ago 2 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 4d ago 1 min read
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 res

Simon Willison's Weblog 4d ago 3 min read
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 buil

Simon Willison's Weblog 4d ago 1 min read
Using DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts

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 m

Simon Willison's Weblog 5d ago 1 min read
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 agen

Simon Willison's Weblog 6d ago 1 min read
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 T

Simon Willison's Weblog 6d ago 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 6d ago 2 min read
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 an

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

Simon Willison's Weblog 30/06/2026 4 min read
Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video

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

Simon Willison's Weblog 30/06/2026 1 min read
shot-scraper 1.10

Release: shot-scraper 1.10 The big new feature is shot-scraper video storyboard.yml, described in detail in Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video.

Simon Willison's Weblog 29/06/2026 1 min read
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 detect

Simon Willison's Weblog 29/06/2026 1 min read
Count the number of Safari tabs

Tiniest TIL, using AppleScript to count the number of open browser tabs in Safari: osascript -e 'tell application Safari to count tabs of every window' Tags: safari, til, applescript

Simon Willison's Weblog 29/06/2026 1 min read
Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding

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,

Simon Willison's Weblog 28/06/2026 1 min read
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 recrui

Simon Willison's Weblog 28/06/2026 1 min read
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 wan

Simon Willison's Weblog 26/06/2026 1 min read
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-r

Simon Willison's Weblog 26/06/2026 1 min read
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 lea

Simon Willison's Weblog 26/06/2026 1 min read
What happened after 2,000 people tried to hack my AI assistant

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

Simon Willison's Weblog 26/06/2026 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 26/06/2026 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 25/06/2026 1 min read
AI and Liability

AI and Liability Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders 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 organizati

Simon Willison's Weblog 25/06/2026 1 min read
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 Datase

Simon Willison's Weblog 24/06/2026 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 24/06/2026 1 min read
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 p

Simon Willison's Weblog 23/06/2026 1 min read
datasette 1.0a35

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

Simon Willison's Weblog 23/06/2026 1 min read
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 per

Simon Willison's Weblog 22/06/2026 2 min read
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 imp

Simon Willison's Weblog 22/06/2026 7 min read
Porting the Moebius 0.2B image inpainting model to run in the browser with Claude Code

This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance, describing a small but effective inpainting model - a model where you can mark region

Simon Willison's Weblog 21/06/2026 4 min read
sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions

sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python's default sqlite3 package, including

Simon Willison's Weblog 21/06/2026 1 min read
sqlite-utils 4.0rc1

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 See sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions. Tags: sqlite-utils

Simon Willison's Weblog 21/06/2026 1 min read
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 ever

Simon Willison's Weblog 19/06/2026 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 18/06/2026 7 min read
Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette

Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I'm going to expand on that a little bit her

Simon Willison's Weblog 18/06/2026 1 min read
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'r

Simon Willison's Weblog 17/06/2026 2 min read
GLM-5.2 is probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM

Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in size to their previou

Simon Willison's Weblog 17/06/2026 1 min read
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 ins

Simon Willison's Weblog 17/06/2026 1 min read
<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>

Simon Willison's Weblog 17/06/2026 1 min read
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 soft

Simon Willison's Weblog 16/06/2026 1 min read
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 tab

Simon Willison's Weblog 16/06/2026 1 min read
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

Simon Willison's Weblog 16/06/2026 1 min read
Quoting Georgi Gerganov

I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 b