Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 28d ago
July 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: Accidental cyberattacks by OpenAl and Anthropic models under test GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna Claude Opus 5 Kimi K3 and…
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Quoting Greg Brockman
at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack. people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker. reinforces how much people care about human…
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datasette-apps 0.2a0
Release: datasette-apps 0.2a0 Changes that improve Datasette Apps when created and edited using Datasette Agent : New app_debug() tool allowing agent to open an app (invisibly) and test it using JavaScript. #33 New app_list() tool for listing apps the user has permission to…
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deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, "with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities". It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears to punch well above its weight. Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3…
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llm-mcp-client 0.1a0
Release: llm-mcp-client 0.1a0 See this blog entry . Tags: llm , model-context-protocol
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datasette-agent 0.4a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.4a0 New await context.browser_task() mechanism allowing agent tools to run code directly in the user's browser. #33 This is an exciting new capability: it makes it easy for Datasette Agent plugins to provide tools that execute custom JavaScript in the…
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llm 0.32rc2
Release: llm 0.32rc2 Hot on the heels of RC1 , this fixes a dependency issue and also adds two neat new features: The default model for users who have not set their own default is now GPT-5.6 Luna . It was previously GPT-4o mini . Luna is a much better and more recent model,…
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Quoting Bruce Schneier
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and…
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llm-chat-completions-server 0.1a0
Release: llm-chat-completions-server 0.1a0 A key goal of the new content-addressable logs in LLM 0.32rc1 was being able to support OpenAI Chat Completion style requests where each incoming message extends the previous conversation, like this: curl…
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llm 0.32rc1
Release: llm 0.32rc1 This RC for LLM 0.32 finishes the work that started in LLM 0.32a0 - it adds a new schema design that does a much better job of capturing the details of the prompts and responses returned by the latest model families. The most important change is the use of…
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Quoting D. Richard Hipp
Years ago, we didn’t have SQL. There were people whose job was to generate software that would query large data sets. Their job title was COBOL programmer. Then SQL comes along—I’m simplifying this only a little bit—and it gives you this convenient way so people could just…
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AI Worming through Word
AI Worming through Word Neat new prompt injection variant by Håkon Måløy, who found a way to upgrade prompt injection attacks against Microsoft Word to full self-replicating worms: An attacker places hidden instructions in a document that is later used as source material in…
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Quoting Matthew Green
Right now we’re in the midst of a historic transition from traditional public-key algorithms based on EC-based cryptography and RSA, moving over to new post-quantum algorithms based on novel problems. This is why there are so many standards like HAWK being considered. If there…
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Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT
TIL: Adding a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT Connecting a custom MCP server to Claude and ChatGPT's standard chat interfaces is possible, but can take quite a few steps. Tags: ai , generative-ai , chatgpt , llms , claude , model-context-protocol
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uv 0.12.0
uv 0.12.0 Some interesting breaking changes in this release of uv , in particular to the default project produced by the uv init command. uv init is the uv shortcut for creating a new project. The previous version of uv , version 0.11.x, produced this directory when you ran uv…
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moonshotai/Kimi-K3
moonshotai/Kimi-K3 As promised earlier this month , Moonshot have released the weights for their excellent 2.8 trillion parameter Kimi K3. They're a hefty 1.56TB on Hugging Face. Kimi introduced their own janky modified version of the MIT license with K2 back in July 2025. That…
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sqlite-utils 3.39.1
Release: sqlite-utils 3.39.1 I back-ported a fix for table.delete_where() that shipped in version 4. Tags: sqlite-utils
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Ruff v0.16.0
Ruff v0.16.0 Astral shipped a significant new version of their Ruff Python linting tool a few days ago on July 23rd. I noticed today because my various CI jobs all started failing thanks to new default Ruff checks and my unpinned "ruff" dev dependency. From Brent Westbrook's…
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Quoting Boris Cherny
More than any of these eval scores, what is most exciting to me is something else: Opus 5 is our least prompt injectable model yet. It is a bit buried in the system card, but across PI evals and red teaming, Opus 5 is very hard to prompt inject successfully. — Boris Cherny…
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Introducing Claude Opus 5
Introducing Claude Opus 5 I've been offline kayaking with sea otters for much of today so I haven't had a chance to put Anthropic's new model Claude Opus 5 through its paces yet. The buzz is positive, and Anthropic's description of it as a "thoughtful and proactive model that…
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Quoting Seth Larson
The Python Package Index (PyPI) now rejects new files being uploaded to releases that are older than 14 days. This restriction was put in place to prevent old and long-stable releases from being poisoned in case publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects were compromised.…
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Quoting Thomas Ptacek
I genuinely believe that if you took an open weights model from 2025 and built a pentest harness for it, it could do this kind of sandbox escape and scan/hack in most networks. This is only surprising because you assume OpenAI has sounder sandboxes. — Thomas Ptacek ,…
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Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?
Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing? Excellent piece of work by Dylan Castillo, who took a deep-dive into the frequently pondered question of whether the AI labs have been deliberately training models to draw pelicans riding bicycles in response to my deeply unscientific benchmark . I've…
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Orchestrions
San Francisco tip: it only costs around $15 ($10 in quarters plus a $5 bill for the self-playing violin) to activate every single Orchestrion in Musée Mécanique . And because most people are bad at allocating their funds you may well be the ONLY person activating the…
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Nativ: Run AI models locally on your Mac
Nativ: Run AI models locally on your Mac Prince Canuma is the developer behind the excellent MLX-VLM Python library for running vision-LLMs using MLX on a Mac. I'm really excited about his new project, which wraps MLX in a full macOS desktop application. It's similar in shape to…
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Reverse-engineering is cheap now
I keep hearing anecdotes from people who used coding agents to reverse-engineer and automate devices in their homes. I think this is an interesting illustration of the impact of the reduced cost of writing code. Prior to agents, it was entirely possible to reverse-engineer home…
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Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and could help US open models compete more effectively with their Chinese…
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Quoting Sam Altman
We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and…
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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making Here's an entertaining perspective from Nik Suresh on the AI mania that is overwhelming the large companies that he consults with. It's crammed with spicy anecdotes from anonymous sources. In one extreme case, I have seen an…
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Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
In Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner made the following claim: Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun. Startup got 10% faster on Linux but otherwise, barely anyone noticed. Boring is good. I decided to have a poke at my own Claude Code…
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SQLite Query Explainer
Tool: SQLite Query Explainer Julia Evan's, in Learning a few things about running SQLite : Maybe one day I’ll learn to read a query plan. Big same.... which inspired me to have Fable build this interactive explain tool, which runs SQLite in Python in Pyodide in Web Assembly in…
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Claude make Fable 5 permanent
Claude make Fable 5 permanent An update from the @claudeai account on Twitter: Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits. Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will…
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nascheme/quixote
nascheme/quixote A certain vintage if Python web nerd might be delighted to learn that the most recent commit to the Quixote web framework was six hours ago . The oldest commit in that repo is from 21 years ago, and that was the initial import of Quixote 2.4 from Subversion into…
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LLM cliché highlighter
Tool: LLM cliché highlighter I got frustrated reading yet another article that was crammed with the clichés of LLM-generated writing - "no fluff, no filler, no jargon" type stuff - so I had Fable 5 vibe code up this app for highlighting ten common patterns that show up in that…
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Spot birds not golf
Suggestion for hyperscalers feeling pressure over data center water use: Buy up a few exclusive country clubs, convert the golf courses into public parks, pay for guides and binoculars to get the previous members into birdwatching - help them embrace a more sustainable hobby!…
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Firefox in WebAssembly
Firefox in WebAssembly This is absurdly cool: Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly such that the whole browser runs in another browser. Here's my blog, running in Firefox, running in WebAssembly, running in Chrome: They chose Firefox/Gecko because it has strong single-process…
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Quoting Thibault Sottiaux
On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files. What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when: Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being…
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