Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 1mo ago
Inkling: Our open-weights model
Inkling: Our open-weights model Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab just released their first open-weights model. Inkling is "a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975B total parameters, 41B active" - an Apache-2.0 licensed multimodal model trained on 45 trillion tokens of text,…
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Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)
Tool: Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii) After building the Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Grok Build's Rust code I learned that there's an older, more fully-featured Go library called AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii that implements a similar pattern, so I had Claude Fable 5…
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Quoting Linus Torvalds
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or…
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Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)
Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid) While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs , a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" written in Rust. I figured it would be fun to…
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xai-org/grok-build, now open source
xai-org/grok-build, now open source xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets. One user reported running it in their home…
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Quoting GitHub Changeling
Dependabot now waits until a new release has been available on its registry for at least three days before opening a version update pull request. This cooldown is now the default and requires no configuration. — GitHub Changeling , embracing dependency cooldowns Tags:…
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simonw/pedalican
simonw/pedalican Clearly I wasn't paying attention when these were first announced back in May, but today I accidentally activated a "pet" in Codex Desktop - a little animated robot, reminiscent of Clippy - and then learned you can create your own. So I did, and now I have a…
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lobste.rs is now running on SQLite
lobste.rs is now running on SQLite Community site Lobsters has been planning a migration away from MariaDB since August 2018 - originally targeting PostgreSQL, but last year they decided to investigate SQLite instead. This weekend they completed the migration, and now consider…
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Quoting Armin Ronacher
The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in…
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DOOMQL
DOOMQL Peter Gostev built this using GPT-5.6 Sol. This is a lot of fun: DOOMQL started with a deliberately unreasonable question: what if SQLite were the game engine, not merely the place where a game stores data? The result is a small, original Doom-like game in which SQL owns…
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datasette code-frequency chart on GitHub
datasette code-frequency chart on GitHub Out of curiosity I decided to see if I could find a useful illustration of the impact of coding agents and Opus 4.5 class models on my own output. The best I've found so far is this GitHub chart of frequency of code changes to my…
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Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)
Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) I went looking for a definition of "Directly Responsible Individuals" and the best I found was in the GitLab handbook. Apparently the term originated at Apple, where it's used to describe the person who is "ultimately accountable for the…
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shot-scraper 1.11
Release: shot-scraper 1.11 Some minor improvements, mainly around command option consistency and making the server: mechanism used by both shot-scraper video and shot-scraper multi work if the server takes longer than a second to start serving traffic. server: processes used by…
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Fable gets another bump
One of the consequences of GPT-5.6 Sol being clearly a Fable/Mythos class model is that Anthropic have, once again, bumped the date that Fable stops being available in their Claude Max plans: We're extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude…
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sqlite-utils 4.1.1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.1.1 Mainly a fix for an edge case that regular Claude chat spotted while experimenting with the 4.1 release to answer a question about ON DELETE. table.transform() now raises a TransactionError if called while a transaction is open with PRAGMA…
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sqlite-utils 4.1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.1 The first dot-release since 4.0 a few days ago , introducing a number of minor new features. sqlite-utils insert and sqlite-utils upsert now accept a --code option for providing a block of Python code (or a path to a .py file) that defines a rows()…
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Quoting Nilay Patel
The reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the…
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Quoting OpenAI
[...] Work on web and mobile runs in the cloud. Work in the desktop app can also use local files and desktop apps with your permission. At launch, cloud Work conversations do not appear in desktop Work; desktop Work threads and local files remain on that computer. — OpenAI…
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The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol
OpenAI's latest flagship model hit general availability this morning , and comes in three sizes: Luna, Terra, and Sol (from smallest to largest). The new models are priced per 1M input/output tokens as Luna $1/$6, Terra $2.50/$15, Sol $5/$30. For comparison, the Claude Opus…
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Introducing Muse Spark 1.1
Introducing Muse Spark 1.1 Following Muse Spark in April , here's Muse Spark 1.1 - the first Spark model to offer an API. Meta claim significant improvements in agentic tool calling and computer use. There are a lot more details are in the Muse Spark 1.1 Evaluation Report . The…
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llm-meta-ai 0.1
Release: llm-meta-ai 0.1 Let's LLM run prompts against the new muse-spark-1.1 model. Tags: llm , meta
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Rewriting Bun in Rust
Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner has been promising this blog post ( since May 9th ) about his Zig to Rust rewrite of Bun for significantly longer than it took him to finish the rewrite. Honestly, it was worth the wait. This is a detailed description of an extremely…
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Introducing GPT‑Live
Introducing GPT‑Live OpenAI finally upgraded the model used by ChatGPT voice mode! I've had preview access for a few weeks in the iPhone app, and the new model is very impressive. It also has the ability to spin off harder tasks to GPT-5.5: For questions that require web search,…
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Quoting Kenton Varda
I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team. AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be…
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sqlite-utils 4.0
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0 See sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations for details. Tags: sqlite-utils
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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 Tencent Hy Team. Following the Hy3 Preview launch in late April, we gathered…
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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 changelog since rc2 kept getting bigger . The biggest new feature is support for…
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sqlite-utils 4.0rc2
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc2 See sqlite-utils 4.0rc2, mostly written by Claude Fable (for about $149.25) .
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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, which is then wired together using this neat snippet of JavaScript. I didn't…
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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 the nested edits[] array. And not Haiku or some small model: Opus 4.8. The edit…
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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 ($400m already committed). They launched their Gap Map a couple of days ago - an…
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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 are down significantly from last year. There are likely a lot of reasons for…
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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 their own judgement rather than dictating how they should work. The example…
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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 restrictions GLM-5.2 is the new best open weights model Tokenmaxxing is so over…
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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 built on it. I started a new Python library using my python-lib-template-repository GitHub…
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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 agents as they construct increasingly large and sophisticated changes, and the need…
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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 Twitter Tags: anthropic , claude , generative-ai , claude-mythos , ai ,…
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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 AI studio to run this prompt: Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where…
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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 announcement post. Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is…
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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 answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer",…
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