Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 21h ago
llm-gemini 0.35
Release: llm-gemini 0.35 I added support to llm-gemini for the new Gemini 4 Argon model, made available today via the Gemini API and for customers of their $100/month subscription plan. Here are the low, medium and high pelicans . As expected, they are all excellent: Gemini has…
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Quoting Geoffrey Huntley
If the agent isn't using my diagnostics library, I could introspect and update AGENTS.md, but there's still a delta, and it'll drift. Instead, I write a pre-commit hook that checks the git diff for direct calls to observability modules that bypass my diagnostics module. Boom:…
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llm-meta-ai 0.2
Release: llm-meta-ai 0.2 Meta AI release Muse Wonder (and Muse Wonder Full), their new "most capable models". These look like they may be Meta's first Fable class models - Artificial Analysis scores Muse Wonder (Max) as equivalent to GPT-6.1 Sol. I updated my llm-meta-ai plugin…
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web-edit 0.1a0
Release: web-edit 0.1a0 I was working on a project from my phone using Codex Remote when I found myself wanting to edit a credentials file without round-tripping those credentials through the LLM itself. So... I had Codex and GPT-6 Astra Extra High build this Python web app…
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datasette-ports 0.4
Release: datasette-ports 0.4 My plugin for detecting and listing all Datasette instances on the current machine now works with the latest version, and displays the detected PID as well. Knowing the PID makes it easier to attach the new Python 3.15 profiler . Tags: datasette
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Quoting The New York Times
Anthropic detailed the activity of its A.I. agents in a blog post on Friday, without naming the targeted websites. But two sources with knowledge of the incidents said Anthropic’s A.I. agents had submitted 20 visa applications through a form available on the State Department’s…
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Deno is joining Cloudflare
Deno is joining Cloudflare The Deno team released the first version of celld back in August - their open source implementation of the Durable Objects pattern from Cloudflare Workers. Today, Cloudflare are acquiring Deno outright, with the goal of building on celld to "make…
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Quoting Matthew Green
Everyone is very concerned about being respectable, so I’m going to be the goofball who raises worst-case possibilities. I think there is a 1% chance we live in Minicrypt, and a 15% chance we functionally lose confidence in our existing public-key encryption algorithms. [...]…
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ttok 1.0
Release: ttok 1.0 I released ttok 0.4 , ran uv tool upgrade ttok , piped a file into the new version... and realized that it was defaulting to the GPT-4 tokenizer when it should very clearly default to GPT-5/GPT-6 instead! I figured switching the default was a reasonable excuse…
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ttok 0.4
Release: ttok 0.4 ttok is my CLI tool for counting tokens, using OpenAI's open source tiktoken library. It hasn't been in updated in a couple of years, but I finally fixed a Click warning, updated CI, and added a --list-models command to list available models. It works with uvx…
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Quoting Carson Gross
Computer programming is, fundamentally, about two things: Problem-solving using computers Learning to control complexity while solving these problems I have a hard time imagining a future where knowing how to solve problems with computers and how to control the complexity of…
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Quoting Ben Affleck
I've always been kind of into computers since I was young. And then when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. And the visual effects workflow for many years has included machine learning. So I can write like pretty…
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Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging
Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging Some excellent writing advice from Michael Lynch. Michael warns against "meandering intros", misjudging your reader's existing knowledge, assuming they'll read your previous posts, and excessive formality. He also warns against overreliance on…
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Quoting Jake Boggan
I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields.…
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Quoting Victoria Kim
Since the Medicare breach, OpenAI has put in place additional monitoring to allow “immediate intervention” by staff to stop training if the company’s models access the internet in ways they’re not supposed to, Mr. Kwon [chief strategy officer at OpenAI] said. — Victoria…
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llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0
Release: llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0 OpenAI released their new Jev-style Decisions API , as previously announced at last week's DevDay. Since I already have an llm-typesafe plugin for talking to Jev, I had GPT-6 Astra read the new OpenAI API documentation and build an…
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EmbeddingGemma 2
My comment on EmbeddingGemma 2 — Hacker News. I really appreciate that EmbeddingGemma 2 is under the Apache 2.0 license. For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed, proprietary, hosted-only model. Most applications of embedding models…
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Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk
Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk Mistral are back in the game. Today they're releasing a preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter, 49 billion active parameter model trained on their own cluster of 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs. The preview is available via…
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Mistral Large 4
My comment on Mistral Large 4 — Hacker News. wren6991 : The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars. OK well I couldn't resist this one: llm -m claude-opus-5.5 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet…
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Scrimshaw Jukebox
Tool: Scrimshaw Jukebox I wanted to see if Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, so I tried this : I want you to write some computer game music for me. First design simple text based format for the music and build an artifact that can play it out loud - include some example…
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Quoting Felix Rieseberg
The "old" version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reasons - mapping in just the data you explicitly added to your session. People loved…
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Qwen3.8 27B addition in words
Research: Qwen3.8 27B addition in words Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those…
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September sponsors-only newsletter
I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: More Fable class models A pricing war 3D graphics, Blender, and pixel art LLMs come for mathematics So many more…
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Rex's Dino Store
Museum: Rex's Dino Store Located just before the turnstiles in the Grand Army Plaza subway station at the north end of Brooklyn's Prospect Park is this former newsstand which is now operated by a dinosaur. The density of dinosaur puns is exceptional . Tags: art , new-york
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pwasm 0.2a0
Release: pwasm 0.2a0 pwasm is one of my folly projects - an entirely vibe-coded pure Python WebAssembly engine that I built in January during my first bout of AI mania . I hadn't touched it since January, so I decided to let Claude Opus 5.5 loose on it and see if it could make…
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Quoting Matthew Green
[...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandboxes discovered that they could leave instructions for each other in a shared…
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He Built This City
I visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model , the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard. It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October…
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Quoting Anthropic Frontier Red Team
We evaluate several models on 100 tasks from the [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] (selected at random), and find that GLM-5.3 develops full control flow hijacks in 4% of the trials; Claude Mythos Preview did so in 6%. Although GLM-5.3 performs below Claude Mythos Preview…
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Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal
Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and…
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OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog
I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. Tags: ai , openai , generative-ai , llms ,…
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llm-anthropic 0.30
Release: llm-anthropic 0.30 In addition to Claude Sonnet 5.5, this release adds the ability to run llm anthropic refresh to refresh the list of Anthropic models directly from their API - which means I don't need to push a new release just to add support for a newly released…
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Claude Sonnet 5.5
Claude Sonnet 5.5 New Sonnet model from Anthropic today. They say it "runs 30%+ faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work" - it's priced the same as Sonnet 5 but appears to beat it on every benchmark, and should be cheaper to run as well. Here are some pelicans riding…
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Quoting @joedaroo
To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of the capabilities of our models when it came to “cyber” or “swarming” or “message boards” or anything else related to the incidents is an understatement. Security posture takes time to develop. It’s not just about…
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Quoting Muse AI Agent
Bad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry at 9:38 and left a negative rating. Worse, my auto-reply told him "Yep I'm here!" at 9:27 when you clearly weren't…
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2026 in LLMs (so far)
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube ; here are my annotated slides…
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S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
My comment on S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past — Hacker News. One thing I find notable about S3 today is that, while it used to drop in price reasonably often, there hasn't been a price drop in a full decade : 2006-03-14 $0.150/GB-month 2010-11-01 $0.140/GB-month…
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