Simon Willison
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GPT-6.1 Terra
GPT-6.1 Terra It's always interesting to note which aspects of a new model are emphasized in the release announcement. In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, OpenAI went with visual reasoning and computer use: We’re introducing GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast, efficient model that combines detailed visual reasoning and…
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Quoting Jason Koebler
Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have…
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webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox
Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox webframe is a neat little project from Jeff Lindsay which lets you "run a web page like a program" - you point it at a URL or file and it executes it in a hidden headless web view and outputs console.log() to standard output and any exceptions…
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Seam Cutter
Tool: Seam Cutter I built this weird and very specific cropping tool - it lets you create a horizontal or vertical cut across an image, then slide the two sides relative to each other. Effectively it lets you crop out a section in the middle of an image. I wanted this because I often use Tailor on my…
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battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map
Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI players, works with the WebSocket non…
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Quick Study
Tool: Quick Study Prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High: Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush See also my previous experiment getting Claude Fable to simulate a watercolor illustration with P5…
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Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro
Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro Kimi K3.1 Pro landed on the Kimi API today - it's not yet open weights, but Moonshot promise "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026". They're also offering a "Highspeed" version that's 2-3x faster, at twice the price (except for input token cache hits, which are…
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DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video)
DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) OK well this is a first for me... at 00:44 in this new music video by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat: The visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it. Via flir on Hacker News Tags: music, ai, generative-ai, pelican-riding-a-bicycle
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Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation
Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation News today from Anthropic: We’re committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Today, we are donating the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which we co-founded with Block and OpenAI…
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Quoting Armin Ronacher
As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins. — Armin Ronacher Tags: security, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, ai-security-research, llms
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Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security
Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security If you're running anything on PHP it's vital you upgrade - today's updates (across the entire PHP 8.x line) address two remote code execution holes, and there have been exploits circulating since last night, thanks to a leak in the…
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Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile
Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork which reskins the game to take place in steampunk 1900s France and adds an animated intro! Panache est un jeu de stratégie en temps…
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eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise
eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores. Any software that bundles a…
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Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer
My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones (play it here). Unlike my previous experiments, this one is actually fun to play. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it a LOT more fun". It also…
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My obituary for programming
My obituary for programming Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code: Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the…
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llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1
Release: llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 When I switched LLM over to httpx2 in LLM 0.33 I forget that this would break any plugins which used httpx without directly depending on it. llm-tools-datasette was one of those plugins, now fixed. Tags: datasette, llm
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llm-echo 0.5
Release: llm-echo 0.5 I'm working towards a new LLM release, and testing PRs caused me to revisit the llm-echo debug plugin. This plugin provides a "model" which doesn't involve an LLM at all - it just repeats back the prompts that have been fed to it. The new release now updates the simulated token…
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Inline rendering with document.currentScript
Inline rendering with document.currentScript Lean Rada describes a neat trick that takes advantage of the document.currentScript property. You can use that to drop in a tiny inline element that replaces itself when the page loads: The year is document.currentScript.replaceWith( new Date().getFullYear…
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web-edit 0.1a2
Release: web-edit 0.1a2 web-edit (previously) is my tiny web app for browsing and editing files in a folder. I mainly built it for editing files on different machines via Tailscale. I added a "copy to clipboard" option for both text and image data. I needed this because I was running pelican prompts…
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Quoting Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang
We think "did a human read the code?" is an imprecise proxy for "what could go wrong with this change, and which check—automated or human—is the right one to catch it?" Asking that question also changed when review happens. Before, review was a gate at the end of the road: write the code, open a PR,…
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sparqlite: SPARQL 1.1 inside SQLite, written in Rust
Research: sparqlite: SPARQL 1.1 inside SQLite, written in Rust This research task is really an experiment in running Claude Code for web in "Ultracode" mode, as described in Orchestrate subagents at scale with dynamic workflows in the Claude Code documentation. With Ultracode turned on, Claude Code makes…
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Chirp Pong
Tool: Chirp Pong Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work! Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their…
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Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO
Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO The phrase "told investors" appears four times in this FT article, which reports on Anthropic's day of hosting investors on Wednesday. Lots of details in here from "people with knowledge of the matter". Key things I learned…
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LaTeX renderer
Tool: LaTeX renderer Inspired by Paul Ford and Aboard Foundary's new web app Tiny Little Office, which provides a suite of web app content editors (a Word Processor, Outliner, Presentation Builder, Spreadsheet, Calculator, Drawing Tool, Diagram Maker, Animator, Calendar, and Trip Planner). Tiny Little…
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Tree Appreciator
Tool: Tree Appreciator Another game experiment with Claude. This one used the default Claude iPhone app (chat mode, not Claude Code mode), where I prompted Claude Opus 5.5 Max with: Build a three js game called "Tree appreciator" - it shows you two algorithmically generated trees and the game mechanics…
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AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary. Indie game developer Popcar talks about the recent wave of AI-powered decompilation of existing games, enabling weird mashups between existing games, and producing a boom in game preservation projects to get old games working on new hardware…
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Redesigning source control at Anthropic
Redesigning source control at Anthropic Interesting piece from Anthropic describing why and how they built their own custom alternative to Git, based on the dramatic increase in rate of changes to their code after the past six months. In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per…
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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 a track record of producing…
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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: fail the commit, inject…
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web-edit 0.1a1
Release: web-edit 0.1a1 Includes performance optimizations written by Claude Opus 5.5 after I fed it this Python 3.15 profiling report generated by GPT-6 Astra. Tags: profiling, projects
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