Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 9h ago
Introducing Hy4 Preview
Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face . This is a big size increase from their previous Hy3 in July, which was 295B, 21B…
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Simon Willison community 2d ago
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its effectiveness. Johann…
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Simon Willison community 3d ago
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4". It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but only 6B active which means it gets a significant performance boost. I've been…
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Simon Willison community 4d ago
Quoting Paul Dix
The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because…
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Simon Willison community 5d ago
llm-anthropic 0.27
Release: llm-anthropic 0.27 This release of the Anthropic plugin for LLM mainly provides compatibility with the recently released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which switches from httpx to httpx2 . OpenAI made the same change in their v3.0.0 release two weeks ago. Anthropic…
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Simon Willison community 5d ago
Your executable is a SQLite database
Your executable is a SQLite database Farid Zakaria describes a neat Linux pattern for creating a SQLite database file that can be directly used as an executable binary. The trick sets the SQLite file format's 4-byte application ID (68 bytes into the file) to SELF, standing for…
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Simon Willison community 6d ago
Quoting Drew Breunig
Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems. But then Fable landed. It was (and still is!) incredible . But the cost was so…
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Simon Willison community 7d ago
Quoting Linus Torvalds
And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it. I suspect…
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Simon Willison community 7d ago
llm 0.33
Release: llm 0.33 My highlights from this release: Upgraded to the OpenAI Python library 3.x and switched the HTTP client dependency from httpx to httpx2 . #1608 , #1631 I shipped a quick 0.32.1 fix for this yesterday, but this is the more comprehensive fix. llm embed and llm…
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Simon Willison community 7d ago
More than just code review
The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way. Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have…
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Simon Willison community 8d ago
llm 0.32.1
Release: llm 0.32.1 Fresh installs of LLM stopped working the other day because the OpenAI Python library dropped its usage of httpx , and it turned out LLM depended on that library but only installed it via a transitive openai dependency. This dot-release fixes that for the…
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Simon Willison community 8d ago
llm-openrouter 0.7
Release: llm-openrouter 0.7 Now that this plugin is compatible with LLM 0.32 it works much better with reasoning LLMs available through OpenRouter. Updated for compatibility with LLM 0.32 . Models now use OpenRouter's implementation of the Responses API . Three new server-side…
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Simon Willison community 8d ago
Stop Making TUIs
Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU…
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Simon Willison community 8d ago
Quoting Matt Webb
After I released version 1.0, I figured I would have to do the rotations myself. So I sat down with ChatGPT and I didn’t get it to write the code, but I got it to educate me. With a patient, interactive tutor, I was able to finally do what I hadn’t by reading books and asking…
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Simon Willison community 10d ago
Quoting Jeremy Morrell
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web . LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable…
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Simon Willison community 10d ago
Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very…
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Simon Willison community 11d ago
Mojo🔥 is now open source
Mojo🔥 is now open source Mojo🔥 is now open source The Mojo programming language has been promising an open source release since May 2023 . Last week they shipped their 1.0 and today they have followed through on that original promise, releasing the compiler and toolchain under…
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Simon Willison community 13d ago
Markdown SVG upgrades
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May , but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans…
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Simon Willison community 13d ago
Quoting Dario Amodei
I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust…
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Simon Willison community 14d ago
CORS Chat
Tool: CORS Chat I built this today ( with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh ) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with…
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Simon Willison community 15d ago
Northern Gannet
Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US This is Morris. Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet ( Morus bassanus ) in the entire Pacific Ocean. He showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago . He has since made Pillar…
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Simon Willison community 15d ago
Don't classify. Hallucinate!
Don't classify. Hallucinate! I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat…
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Simon Willison community 16d ago
sqlite-utils 4.2.1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2.1 Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2 . I'd introduced code that looks like this: from typing_extensions import Self It turned out the typing-extensions package was not listed as a dependency for sqlite-utils - it was installed by one of the other…
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Simon Willison community 16d ago
sqlite-utils 4.2
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2 Lots of improvements in this one relating to the table.transform() feature , which adds support for complex alter table operations by creating a fresh table, copying across the data and then dropping and replacing the old one. transform() now preserves…
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Simon Willison community 16d ago
llm-gemini 0.33
Release: llm-gemini 0.33 It's been a while since the last llm-gemini release. This version of the plugin adds support for today's Gemini 3.7 Flash release, plus gemini-3.6-flash , gemini-3.5-flash-lite and two embedding models gemini-embedding-2 and gemini-embedding-001 . The…
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Simon Willison community 17d ago
alchemy-utils 0.1a1
Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a1 Performance boost for DuckDB exports and CSV imports, see here .
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Simon Willison community 17d ago
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter)
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter) The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new model. I haven't been able to confirm if they plan to release the open weights,…
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Simon Willison community 17d ago
alchemy-utils 0.1a0
Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a0 I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like. This morning (literally a shower project) I tasked Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with building a prototype: Do a research spike to…
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Simon Willison community 17d ago
Quoting Florian Herrengt
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out. You go talk to the person who worked on this feature. "So where does the data come…
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Simon Willison community 17d ago
Quoting Florian Herrengt
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out. You go talk to the person who worked on this feature. "So where does the data come…
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Simon Willison community 18d ago
datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0
Release: datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0 This plugin has been around for a while - it lets users upload a brand new SQLite database to a hosted Datasette instance, at which point that database will start being served by that instance. It can also be used to atomically swap a database…
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Simon Willison community 18d ago
datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0
Release: datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0 This plugin has been around for a while - it lets users upload a brand new SQLite database to a hosted Datasette instance, at which point that database will start being served by that instance. It can also be used to atomically swap a database…
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Simon Willison community 19d ago
Introducing Muse Glimmer
Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). Here's a pelican which I generated using LM Studio's 18.16 GB version of the model : I really…
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Simon Willison community 19d ago
Introducing Muse Glimmer
Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). They claim to have optimized it for exactly the kind of things I'm looking for in a local…
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Simon Willison community 20d ago
Quoting OpenClaw
The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already. — OpenClaw , hacking an Australian gym-booking website Tags:…
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Simon Willison community 20d ago
Quoting OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6)
The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already. — OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6) , hacking an Australian gym-booking…
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Simon Willison community 20d ago
Quoting Claude Opus 5 system prompt
Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 were first released on June 9, 2026. On June 12, 2026, Anthropic suspended access to both models to comply with U.S. Department of Commerce export controls; the Department lifted those controls on June 30, 2026, and Anthropic restored access on…
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