Simon Willison · Jul 20, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 19, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 19, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 18, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 18, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 18, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 17, 2026
Is there something I can actually help you with today? — Kimi K3, after refusing to leak its system prompt Tags: kimi, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms
Simon Willison · Jul 17, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 17, 2026
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!…
Simon Willison · Jul 16, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 16, 2026
Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 this morning, describing it as their "most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters". It's currently available via their website and API, but an open weight release is promised "by July 27, 2026". Moonshot are calling this…
Simon Willison · Jul 16, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 16, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 16, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 16, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 16, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 15, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 15, 2026
How I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets I've been impressed by the way the Claude web_fetch tool is designed to avoid data exfiltration attacks. Ayush Paul found a hole in that design. To recap: regular Claude chat is at risk of lethal trifecta attacks…
Simon Willison · Jul 14, 2026
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 Changelog, embracing dependency cooldowns Tags…
Simon Willison · Jul 14, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 14, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 14, 2026
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…
Simon Willison · Jul 14, 2026
Release: datasette 1.0a37 A minor release. Performance and documentation improvements to the permissions system, plus I reverted a cosmetic API change which caused almost every existing plugin test suite to break. Tags: datasette
Simon Willison · Jul 14, 2026
TIL: Using uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly way I finally found a cache-friendly recipe for using uvx tool-name in GitHub Actions workflows that I like. The trick is setting a UV_EXCLUDE_NEWER: "2026-07-12" environment variable at the start of the workflow and then…
Xe Iaso · Jul 14, 2026
A presigned URL is a replay attack you did on purpose. Replayable auth tokens are the textbook way to create vulnerable systems, but Tigris ships them as a first-class feature with presigned URLs and so does every other object storage system on the planet. However this isn't an…
Xe Iaso · Jul 14, 2026
TL;DR: is your refrigerator running malware? If so, you better catch it!
Simon Willison · Jul 13, 2026
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…
Xe Iaso · Jul 9, 2026
Valve wins by doing absolutely nothing
Xe Iaso · Jul 8, 2026
I managed to write this without using the word endofunctor once. Wait, shit, I just did. Uhhh, oops!
Xe Iaso · Jun 25, 2026
In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-8461 for the project FFmpeg, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix an out-of-bounds write in the MagicYUV decoder (libavcodec/magicyuv.c) caused by…
Xe Iaso · Jun 24, 2026
In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-55200 for the project libssh2, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix an out-of-bounds write in ssh2_transport_read() due to a missing upper bound…
Xe Iaso · Jun 23, 2026
What happens if I just point a git server at an object storage bucket? Back when I was porting agent sandboxes to Go, I built everything on top of billy, a filesystem abstraction for Go. The whole trick of the project was teaching a Tigris bucket to act enough like a filesystem…