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Simon Willison

simon@fedi.simonwillison.net

<p>Open source developer building tools to help journalists, archivists, librarians and others analyze, explore and publish their data. <a href="https://datasette.io" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">datasette.io</span><span class="invisible"></span></a> and many other <a href="https://fedi.simonwillison.net/tags/projects" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#<span>projects</span></a>.</p>

Posts

  • Post #4174459

    Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI&#39;s accidental cyberattack on their systems - it&#39;s wild how sophisticated this was: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline Wrote up some of my own notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/anatomy-of-a-frontier-lab-agent-intrusion/

  • Post #4099809

    Ruff 0.16.0 - Astral&#39;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 alone) https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/25/ruff/

  • Post #4060869

    I may have finally found the Python-in-a-sandbox solution I&amp;#39;ve been looking for... here&amp;#39;s my latest experiment, this time running MicroPython in WebAssembly inside my Python applications https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/6/micropython-in-a-sandbox/

  • Post #4060868

    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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/9/claude-fable-5/

  • Post #4060867

    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 help of Claude Fable 5) https://datasette.io/blog/2026/api-extras/

  • Post #4060866

    After two days with Claude Fable 5 the best way I can describe it is &amp;quot;relentlessly proactive&amp;quot; - here&amp;#39;s an example where I dropped in a screenshot of a bug and it span up custom CORS Python servers and used pyobjc-framework-Quartz to capture screenshots https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/11/fable-is-relentlessly-proactive/

  • Post #4060865

    It&amp;#39;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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/13/publishing-wasm-wheels/

  • Post #4060864

    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: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/21/sqlite-utils-40rc1/

  • Post #4060863

    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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/22/porting-moebius/

  • Post #4060862

    I&amp;#39;ve added video support to my &amp;quot;shot-scraper&amp;quot; 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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/30/shot-scraper-video/

  • Post #4060861

    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: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/9/gpt-5-6/

  • Post #4060860

    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 https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/uvx-github-actions-cache

  • Post #4023166

    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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/

  • Post #3874480

    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 across longer conversations) https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/kimi-k3/

  • Post #3656585

    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 forced me to bump that number! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/7/sqlite-utils-4/

  • Post #3349167

    Uber reportedly now caps coding agents at $1,500/month per employee per tool - seems sensible to me, but it&#39;s also an interesting hint at the value Uber thinks these tools are providing https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/3/uber-caps-usage/

  • Post #3349160

    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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/18/datasette-apps/

  • Post #2562506

    Fantastic Bing prompt from Ethan Mollick: “I am on a really nice White Star cruise from Southampton, and it is 14th April 1912. What should I do tonight?”—Bing takes this very seriously and tries to help out! Works for all sorts of other historic events as well. https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1629653225472131076

  • Post #2522024

    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&amp;#39;s private backend API a semi-approved mechanism... and that one has GPT-5.5... So I used it to draw some pelicans https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/gpt-5-5/

  • Post #2522022

    I vibe coded a web UI to LiteParse by LlamaIndex, a neat open source library for extracting text from annoying layouts PDFs https://simonw.github.io/liteparse/ More about how I built it on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/liteparse-for-the-web/

  • Post #2522021

    This week&amp;#39;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 Agentic Engineering Patterns guide https://simonw.substack.com/p/gpt-55-chatgpt-images-20-qwen36-27b

  • Post #2522019

    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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/24/deepseek-v4/

  • Post #2522018

    Today OpenAI announced that &amp;quot;Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress&amp;quot; That &amp;quot;independent of OpenAI’s technology progress&amp;quot; fragment appears to mean that the weird AGI clause is now deceased https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/now-deceased-agi-clause/

  • Post #2522017

    Microsoft&amp;#39;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 transcribing 1hr of audio in ~9 mins https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/

  • Post #2522016

    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 other new frontier capabilities https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/29/llm/

  • Post #2522015

    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&amp;#39;s overall timeline https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/2/sightings/

  • Post #2509833

    Wrote about today&amp;#39;s GitLab restructuring / &amp;quot;workforce reduction&amp;quot; announcement, and ended up digging around in version control for both the GitLab and the 37signals public employee handbooks to help illustrate my thoughts https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/gitlab-act-2/

  • Post #2444235

    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 - https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/llm-shebang

  • Post #2420304

    I&amp;#39;m glad somebody out there is brave enough to push back against the &amp;quot;personal ChatGPT usage is terrible for the environment&amp;quot; message https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about &amp;quot;If you want to prompt ChatGPT 40 times, you can just stop your shower 1 second early.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If I choose not to take a flight to Europe, I save 3,500,000 ChatGPT searches. this is like stopping more than 7 people from searching ChatGPT for the...

  • Post #2407737

    Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.