Simon Willison
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llm-gemini 0.34
Release: llm-gemini 0.34 New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash, with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146 Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version. Thanks, Charlie Tonneslan. #137 Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash (and 3.8 Flash Cyber, but that's available to…
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Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes to their prompts as well. They used to keep…
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Quoting Rick Brewster
Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that…
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Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a 52.6% score on the brand new Terminal-Bench-Science…
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Codex bundles LibreOffice
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation…
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GeoJSON Map Viewer
Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council) and found a need to display some GeoJSON files on a map and export that as a PNG. I asked GPT-5.6-Sol for suggestions of tools…
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Quoting Tarn Adams
They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes — Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress Tags: ai, game-design
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datasette-mcp 0.2
Release: datasette-mcp 0.2 "rows" from execute_sql is now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which column. #1 Now depends on mcp>=2.1.1. This is the first non-alpha release of the plugin…
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Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here!
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this…
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Introducing wrapture
Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and tracing at the same time. Wrapture (full documentation here) makes it easy to wrap any…
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Quoting Andrew Digby
325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible with sustained effort. — Andrew Digby, providing the best news of the year Tags: kakapo
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Understanding ChatGPT Work
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that…
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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 active, 256,000 context…
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Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat alarming post he reports that security issues in OCaml projects are seeing evidence of attempted exploits…
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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 Rehberger is one of the…
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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 trying it out on a DGX…
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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 they had an oracle to…
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EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins! EVE Online has been one of the most interesting case studies in Python at scale for over twenty years now. They've been running on Stackless Python since their launch in 2003, and their last major upgrade was 16 years ago, to Stackless Python 2.7 in 2010. Their…
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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 provide this migration guide…
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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 Structured Executable …
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Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter": Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more historic numbers here. Anthropic…
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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 high and Opus was good…
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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 those things have been trained…
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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 embed-multi now accept --key…
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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 written, but there are other…
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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 moment by pinning to openai…
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llm-openrouter 0.7
Release: llm-openrouter 0.7 Now that this plugin is compatible with LLM 0.32 it can display the reasoning traces for 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 tools: Shell, WebFetch…
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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 monitoring macOS task bar…
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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 mathematician friends –…
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ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale
ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale Promptwatch is part of the emerging "GEO" space, for Generative Engine Optimization - the chatbot version of SEO, where companies offer tools and consulting to help your site increase its presence in replies to prompts inside tools like ChatGPT. The…
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