Welcome to the Datasette blog

Quoting Boris Mann

13th May 2026 “11 AI agents” is meaningless as a phrase. If I said “I have 11 spreadsheets” or “I have 11 browser tabs” to do my work, it means about the same thing. Recent articles - Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal - 7th May 2026 - Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026 - 6th May 2026 - Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like - 6th May 2026

CSP Allow-list Experiment

13th May 2026 An experiment that shows that you can load an app in a CSP-protected sandboxed iframe (see previous note) and have a custom fetch() that intercepts CSP errors and passes them up to the parent window... which can then prompt the user to add that domain to an allow-list and then refresh the page. I built this one with GPT-5.5 xhigh running in the Codex desktop app. Recent articles - Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal - 7th May 2026 - Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026 - 6th May 2026 - Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like - 6th May 2026

llm 0.32a2

12th May 2026 A bunch of useful stuff in this LLM alpha, but the most important detail is this one: Most reasoning-capable OpenAI models now use the /v1/responses endpoint instead of/v1/chat/completions . This enables interleaved reasoning across tool calls for GPT-5 class models. #1435 This means you can now see the summarized reasoning tokens when you run prompts against an OpenAI model, displayed in a different color to standard error. Use the -R or --hide-reasoning flags if you don't want to see that. Recent articles - Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal - 7th May 2026 - Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026 - 6th May 2026 - Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like - 6th May 2026

Quoting Mitchell Hashimoto

12th May 2026 The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and NEVER THINK ABOUT WORK AGAIN. So to achieve all that, they follow secular trends supported by analysts and broad public sentiment. Oh, Gartner said that "AI strategy" is most important? McKinsey said "context" needs to be managed? Well, "Context Engine for AI Apps" is going to be defensible. Buy it. — Mitchell Hashimoto, in a conversation about the design of the Redis homepage Recent articles - Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal - 7th May 2026 - Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026 - 6th May 2026 - Vibe coding and agentic…

Quoting Mo Bitar

12th May 2026 Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something. It's called Ralph Loops. And I think it could change literally everything. And he's gonna say, what's a Ralph loop? And you will say, give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I'll show you. Now you won't actually do anything, because you can't do anything. Because nobody can, because nobody knows what they're doing. But by the time he figures that out, you'll have a new title, and equity bump. [...] Talk about automation constantly. Nothing arouses the slumbering capitalists than the mention of automation. Drop names too, bro. Like talk about specific…

datasette 1.0a29

12th May 2026 - New TokenRestrictions.abbreviated(datasette) utility method for creating"_r" dictionaries. #2695- Table headers and column options are now visible even if a table contains zero rows. #2701 - Fixed bug with display of column actions dialog on Mobile Safari. #2708 - Fixed bug where tests could crash with a segfault due to a race condition between Datasette.close() andDatasette.close() . #2709 That segfault bug was gnarly. I added a mechanism to Datasette recently that would automatically close connections at the end of each test, but it turned out that introduced a race condition where an in-flight query could sometimes be executing in a thread against a connection while it was being closed. I ended up solving that by having Codex CLI (with GPT-5.5 xhigh) create a minimal Dockerfile that recreated the bug. Recent articles - Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data…

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

11th May 2026 - Link Blog Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain (via) Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles. I particularly liked his use of the term "Zombie Internet" to define a different, more insidious alternative to the "Dead Internet" (which is just bots talking to each other): I called it the Zombie Internet because the truth is that large parts of the internet are not just bots talking to bots or bots talking to people. It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI, and it’s people using AI…

Learning on the Shop floor

11th May 2026 - Link Blog Learning on the Shop floor. Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack: River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public channel for you and her to start working in. I myself work with river in #tobi_river channel and many followed this pattern. Every conversation is therefore searchable. Anyone at Shopify can jump in. In my own channel, there are over 100 people who, react to threads, add color and add context, pick up the torch, help with the reviews, remind me how rusty I am, and importantly, learn from watching. [...]As so often with German, there is a word for the kind of environment: Lehrwerkstatt. Literally: A teaching workshop. The whole shop floor is the classroom.…

GitLab Act 2

11th May 2026 - Link Blog GitLab Act 2 (via) There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the "workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions" they are making with respect to the agentic era. - They're "planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams". One of the most interesting things about GitLab is that they have employees spread across a large number of countries - 18 are listed in their public employee handbook but this post says they are "operating in nearly 60 countries". That handbook used to document their payroll workflows for those countries too - they stopped publishing that in 2023 but the last public version (hooray for version control) remains a fascinating read. Since we don't know which of those 60 countries have small teams,…

Quoting James Shore

11th May 2026 Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise, you’re screwed. You’re trading a temporary speed boost for permanent indenture. [...] The math only works if the LLM decreases your maintenance costs, and by exactly the inverse of the rate it adds code. If you double your output and your cost of maintaining that output, two times two means you’ve quadrupled your maintenance costs. If you double your output and hold your maintenance costs steady, two times one means you’ve still doubled your maintenance costs. — James Shore, You Need AI That Reduces Maintenance Costs Recent articles - Notes…

Using LLM in the shebang line of a script

11th May 2026 Kim_Bruning on Hacker News: But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...] This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with LLM. Here's the simplest, which takes advantage of LLM fragments: #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -f Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle But you can also incorporate tool calls using the -T name_of_tool option: #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -T llm_time -f Write a haiku that mentions the exact current time Or even execute YAML templates directly that define extra tools as Python functions: #!/usr/bin/env -S llm -t model: gpt-5.4-mini system: | Use tools to run calculations functions: | def add(a: int, b: int) -> int: return a + b def multiply(a: int, b: int) -> int: return a * b Then: ./calc.sh 'what…

Quoting New York Times Editors’ Note

10th May 2026 This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned. The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. [...] He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech. Recent articles - Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal - 7th May 2026 - Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026 - 6th May 2026 - Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like - 6th May 2026

Quoting Andrew Quinn

10th May 2026 One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has already written 30 or 40 years ago; I could write a TSV-aware search and replace, or I could find out about awk and solve that entire class of problems in one fell swoop, for example. My central conceit is that this is a trap. You need to reinvent a couple of wheels to get to the edge of what we know about wheel-making, not a thousand wheels, and not zero; probably four or five is sufficient in most domains, maybe closer to twenty or thirty in the most epistemically rigorous…

Quoting Luke Curley

9th May 2026 WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions. wtf my dude WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The idea is that conference calls depend on rapid back-and-forth, so pausing to wait for audio is unacceptable. …but as a user, I would much rather wait an extra 200ms for my slow/expensive prompt to be accurate. After all, I’m paying good money to boil the ocean, and a garbage prompt means a garbage response. It’s not like LLMs are particularly responsive anyway. But I’m not allowed to wait. It’s impossible to even retransmit a WebRTC audio packet within a browser; we tried at Discord. The implementation is hard-coded for real-time latency or else. — Luke Curley, OpenAI’s WebRTC…

Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML

8th May 2026 - Link Blog Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML. Thought-provoking piece by Thariq Shihipar (on the Claude Code team at Anthropic) advocating for HTML over Markdown as an output format to request from Claude. The article is crammed with interesting examples (collected on this site) and prompt suggestions like this one: Help me review this PR by creating an HTML artifact that describes it. I'm not very familiar with the streaming/backpressure logic so focus on that. Render the actual diff with inline margin annotations, color-code findings by severity and whatever else might be needed to convey the concept well. I've been defaulting to asking for most things in Markdown since the GPT-4 days, when the 8,192 token limit meant that Markdown's token-efficiency over HTML was extremely worthwhile. Thariq's piece here has caused me to reconsider…

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview

7th May 2026 - Link Blog Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview (via) Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox: Suddenly, the bugs are very good Just a few months ago, AI-generated security bug reports to open source projects were mostly known for being unwanted slop. Dealing with reports that look plausibly correct but are wrong imposes an asymmetric cost on project maintainers: it’s cheap and easy to prompt an LLM to find a “problem” in code, but slow and expensive to respond to it. It is difficult to overstate how much this dynamic changed for us over a few short months. This was due to a combination of two main factors. First, the models got a lot more capable.…

llm-gemini 0.31

7th May 2026 gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview. Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then. Recent articles - Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal - 7th May 2026 - Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026 - 6th May 2026 - Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like - 6th May 2026

Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal

Notes on the xAI/Anthropic data center deal 7th May 2026 There weren’t a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday’s Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they’ve struck with SpaceX/xAI to use “all of the capacity of their Colossus data center”. As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote, that’s the one with the particularly bad environmental record. The gas turbines installed to power the facility initially ran without Clean Air Act permits or pollution control devices, which they got away with by classifying them as “temporary”. Credible reports link it to increases in hospital admissions relating to low air quality. Andy Masley, one of the most prolific voices pushing back against misleading rhetoric about data centers (see The AI water issue is fake and Data center land issues are…

GitHub Repo Stats

7th May 2026 Tool GitHub Repo Stats — View GitHub repository statistics including commit counts, contributor information, language breakdowns, and release details by entering a repository name or URL. This tool fetches data directly from the GitHub REST API in your browser, displaying comprehensive metrics such as stars, forks, branches, tags, and activity timestamps. Optionally authenticate with GitHub to increase your API rate limit from 60 to 5,000 requests per hour. One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt: Given a GitHub repo URL or foo/bar repo ID show information about that repo absorbed via wither REST or graphql CORS fetch() including the number of commits in…

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like 6th May 2026 I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit’s High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my highlights, including my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to converge in my own work. One thing I really enjoy about podcasts is that they sometimes push me to think out loud in a way that exposes an idea I’ve not previously been able to put into words. Vibe coding and agentic engineering are starting to overlap A few weeks after vibe coding was first coined I published Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks), where I firmly staked out my belief that “vibe coding” is a very…

Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026

Live blog: Code w/ Claude 2026 6th May 2026 I’m at Anthropic’s Code w/ Claude event in 2026, and I’ll be live blogging the keynote and a few other notes throughout the day. 08:56 I'm now seated in the main room. The keynote starts at 9am. 09:03 Cute opening animation featuring the little orange Claude pixel art character. 09:05 On stage: Anthropic's Chief Product Officer Ami Vora - who replaced Mike Krieger earlier this year (he's now the co-lead of Anthropic Labs.) 09:07 Ami is sharing anecdotes about developer velocity - Scott MacVicar's team at Stripe, Felicia Curcuru's team at Binti. 09:07 (This is all a little bit too inspirational for my liking, I'm hoping for some new model / product / feature announcements!) 09:09 Now talking about Mythos reading the OpenBSD source tree and finding a 27-year-old vulnerability, to…

datasette-referrer-policy 0.1

5th May 2026 The OpenStreetMap tiles on the Datasette global-power-plants demo weren't displaying correctly. This turned out to be caused by two bugs. The first is that the CAPTCHA I added to that site a few weeks ago was triggering for the .json fetch requests used by the map plugin, and since those weren't HTML the user was not being asked to solve them. Here's the fix. The second was that OpenStreetMap quite reasonably block tile requests from sites that use a Referrer-Policy: no-referrer header. Datasette does this by default, and I didn't want to change that default on people without warning - so I had Codex + GPT-5.5 build me a new plugin to help set that header to another value. Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history…

Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm

5th May 2026 - Link Blog Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm (via) Andon Labs previously started an AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Now they're running a similar experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, only this time it's a cafe. These experiments are interesting, and often throw out amusing anecdotes: During the first week of inventory, Mona ordered 120 eggs even though the café has no stove. When the staff told her they couldn’t cook them, she suggested using the high-speed oven, until they pointed out the eggs would likely explode. She also tried to solve the problem of fresh tomatoes being spoiled too fast by ordering 22.5 kg of canned tomatoes for the fresh sandwiches. The baristas eventually started a “Hall of Shame”, a shelf visible to customers with all the weird things Mona ordered, including 6,000 napkins, 3,000…

datasette-llm 0.1a7

5th May 2026 - Mechanism for configuring default options for specific models. Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to configure a model with default options, e.g. to say all enrichment operations should use a specific model with temperature set to 0.5. Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026

llm-echo 0.5a0

5th May 2026 - New -o thinking 1 option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher. This plugin provides a fake model called "echo" for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for writing automated tests. You can now do this: uvx --with llm==0.32a1 --with llm-echo==0.5a0 llm -m echo hi -o thinking 1 This will fake a reasoning block to standard error before returning JSON echoing the prompt. Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026

Quoting John Gruber

5th May 2026 So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion. — John Gruber, Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026

Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery

4th May 2026 - Link Blog Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery. IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. Granite 4.1 LLMs: How They’re Built by Granite team member Yousaf Shah describes the training process in detail. Unsloth released the unsloth/granite-4.1-3b-GGUF collection of GGUF encoded quantized variants of the 3B model - 21 different model files ranging in size from 1.2GB to 6.34GB. All 21 of those Unsloth files add up to 51.3GB, which inspired me to finally try an experiment I've been wanting to run for ages: prompting "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" against different sized quantized variants of the same model to see what the results would look like. Honestly, the results are less interesting than I…

Quoting Andy Masley

4th May 2026 [...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access. And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland. — Andy Masley, pushing back against the "land use" argument against data center construction Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on…

April 2026 newsletter

4th May 2026 I just sent out the April edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: - Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, both with price increases - Claude Mythos and LLM security research - ChatGPT Images 2.0 - More model releases - Other highlights from my blog - What I'm using, April 2026 edition Here's a copy of the March newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy! Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price…

TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo

4th May 2026 Research TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo — Demonstrating robust regex performance, this project offers a minimal Python ctypes binding to the TRE regex library, highlighting TRE’s immunity to regular expression denial-of-service (ReDoS) attacks that cripple Python's built-in `re` module. Key benchmarks show that TRE processes even notorious "evil" patterns on gigantic inputs (10 million characters) much faster than `re` on tiny ones, and scales linearly with input size instead of exponentially. If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more detail. I had Claude Code build an experimental Python binding (it used ctypes ) and try some malicious regular expression attacks against the library. TRE handles those much better than Python's standard library implementation, thanks mainly to the lack…

Redis Array Playground

4th May 2026 Salvatore Sanfilippo submitted a PR adding a new data type - arrays - to Redis. The new commands are ARCOUNT , ARDEL , ARDELRANGE , ARGET , ARGETRANGE , ARGREP , ARINFO , ARINSERT , ARLASTITEMS , ARLEN , ARMGET , ARMSET , ARNEXT , AROP , ARRING , ARSCAN , ARSEEK , ARSET . The implementation is currently available in a branch, so I had Claude Code for web build this interactive playground for trying out the new commands in a WASM-compiled build of a subset of Redis running in the browser. The most interesting new command is ARGREP which can run a server-side grep against a range of values in the array using the newly vendored TRE regex library. Salvatore wrote more about the AI-assisted development process for the array type in Redis array type:…

Quoting Anthropic

3rd May 2026 We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on spirituality, and 25% of conversations on relationships. — Anthropic, How people ask Claude for personal guidance Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April…

iNaturalist Sightings

1st May 2026 I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my phone using Claude Code for web. I started by building an inaturalist-clumper Python CLI for fetching and "clumping" observations - by default clumps use observations within 2 hours and 5km of each other. Then I setup simonw/inaturalist-clumps as a Git scraping repository to run that tool and record the result to clumps.json. That JSON file is hosted on GitHub, which means it can be fetched by JavaScript using CORS. Finally I ran this prompt against my simonw/tools repo: Build inat-sightings.html - an app that does a fetch() against https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/inaturalist-clumps/refs/heads/main/clumps.json and then displays all of the observations on one page using the https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/538073008/small.jpg small.jpg URLs for the thumbnails -…

Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities

30th April 2026 - Link Blog Our evaluation of OpenAI's GPT-5.5 cyber capabilities. The UK's AI Security Institute previously evaluated Claude Mythos: now they've evaluated GPT-5.5 for finding security vulnerability and found it to be comparable to Mythos, but unlike Mythos it's generally available right now. Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026

Quoting Andrew Kelley

30th April 2026 It's a common misconception that we can't tell who is using LLM and who is not. I'm sure we didn't catch 100% of LLM-assisted PRs over the past few months, but the kind of mistakes humans make are fundamentally different than LLM hallucinations, making them easy to spot. Furthermore, people who come from the world of agentic coding have a certain digital smell that is not obvious to them but is obvious to those who abstain. It's like when a smoker walks into the room, everybody who doesn't smoke instantly knows it. I'm not telling you not to smoke, but I am telling you not to smoke in my house. — Andrew Kelley, Creator of Zig Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased…

We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps

30th April 2026 - Link Blog We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps. Matt Webb: I would love an RSS web feed for all those various tools and apps pages, each item with an “Install” button. (But install to where?) The lesson here is that when vibe-coding accelerates app development, apps become more personal, more situated, and more frequent. Shipping a tool or a micro-app is less like launching a website and more like posting on a blog. This inspired me to have Claude add an Atom feed (and icon) to my /elsewhere/tools/ page, which itself is populated by content from my tools.simonwillison.net site. Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on…

The Zig project's rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policy

30th April 2026 Zig has one of the most stringent anti-LLM policies of any major open source project: No LLMs for issues. No LLMs for pull requests. No LLMs for comments on the bug tracker, including translation. English is encouraged, but not required. You are welcome to post in your native language and rely on others to have their own translation tools of choice to interpret your words. The most prominent project written in Zig may be the Bun JavaScript runtime, which was acquired by Anthropic in December 2025 and, unsurprisingly, makes heavy use of AI assistance. Bun operates its own fork of Zig, and recently achieved a 4x performance improvement on Bun compile after adding "parallel semantic analysis and multiple codegen units to the llvm backend". Here's that code. But @bunjavascript says: We do not currently plan to upstream…

Codex CLI 0.128.0 adds /goal

30th April 2026 - Link Blog Codex CLI 0.128.0 adds /goal. The latest version of OpenAI's Codex CLI coding agent adds their own version of the Ralph loop: you can now set a /goal and Codex will keep on looping until it evaluates that the goal has been completed... or the configured token budget has been exhausted. It looks like the feature is mainly implemented though the goals/continuation.md and goals/budget_limit.md prompts, which are automatically injected at the end of a turn. Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026

llm 0.32a0

29th April 2026 Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026

LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor

LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor 29th April 2026 I just released LLM 0.32a0, an alpha release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for accessing LLMs, with some consequential changes that I’ve been working towards for quite a while. Previous versions of LLM modeled the world in terms of prompts and responses. Send the model a text prompt, get back a text response. import llm model = llm.get_model("gpt-5.5") response = model.prompt("Capital of France?") print(response.text()) This made sense when I started working on the library back in April 2023. A lot has changed since then! LLM provides an abstraction over thousands of different models via its plugin system. The original abstraction—of text input that returns text output—was no longer able to represent everything I needed it to. Over time LLM itself has grown attachments to handle image, audio,…

llm 0.32a1

29th April 2026 - Fixed a bug in 0.32a0 where tool-calling conversations were not correctly reinflated from SQLite. #1426 Recent articles - LLM 0.32a0 is a major backwards-compatible refactor - 29th April 2026 - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026

Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

28th April 2026 - Link Blog Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 (via) New project from Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (of GPT, GPT-2, Whisper fame). talkie-1930-13b-base (53.1 GB) is a "13B language model trained on 260B tokens of historical pre-1931 English text". talkie-1930-13b-it (26.6 GB) is a checkpoint "finetuned using a novel dataset of instruction-response pairs extracted from pre-1931 reference works", designed to power a chat interface. You can try that out here. Both models are Apache 2.0 licensed. Since the training data for the base model is entirely out of copyright (the USA copyright cutoff date is currently January 1, 1931), I'm hoping they later decide to release the training data as well. Update on that: Nick Levine on Twitter: Will publish more on the corpus in the future (and do our best…

What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns!

28th April 2026 - Link Blog What's new in pip 26.1 - lockfiles and dependency cooldowns! (via) Richard Si describes an excellent set of upgrades to Python's default pip tool for installing dependencies. This version drops support for Python 3.9 - fair enough, since it's been EOL since October. macOS still ships with python3 as a default Python 3.9, so I tried out the new Python version against Python 3.14 like this: uv python install 3.14 mkdir /tmp/experiment cd /tmp/experiment python3.14 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate pip install -U pip pip --version This confirmed I had pip 26.1 - then I tried out the new lock files: pip lock datasette llm This installs Datasette and LLM and all of their dependencies and writes the whole lot to a 519 line pylock.toml file - here's the result. The new release also…

Quoting Matthew Yglesias

28th April 2026 Five months in, I think I've decided that I don't want to vibecode — I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that they sell to me for money. Recent articles - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026

Quoting OpenAI Codex base_instructions

28th April 2026 Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. — OpenAI Codex base_instructions, for GPT-5.5 Recent articles - Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause - 27th April 2026 - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026

Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices

27th April 2026 - Link Blog Speech translation in Google Meet is now rolling out to mobile devices. I just encountered this feature via a "try this out now" prompt in a Google Meet meeting. It kind-of worked! This is Google's implementation of the ultimate sci-fi translation app, where two people can talk to each other in two separate languages and Meet translates from one to the other and - with a short delay - repeats the text in your preferred language, with a rough imitation of the original speaker's voice. It can only handle English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, and Italian at the moment. It's also still very alpha - I ran it successfully between two laptops running web browsers, but then when I tried between an iPhone and an iPad it didn't seem to work. Recent articles -…

Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause

Tracking the history of the now-deceased OpenAI Microsoft AGI clause 27th April 2026 For many years, Microsoft and OpenAI’s relationship has included a weird clause saying that, should AGI be achieved, Microsoft’s commercial IP rights to OpenAI’s technology would be null and void. That clause appeared to end today. I decided to try and track its expression over time on openai.com. OpenAI, July 22nd 2019 in Microsoft invests in and partners with OpenAI to support us building beneficial AGI (emphasis mine): OpenAI is producing a sequence of increasingly powerful AI technologies, which requires a lot of capital for computational power. The most obvious way to cover costs is to build a product, but that would mean changing our focus. Instead, we intend to license some of our pre-AGI technologies, with Microsoft becoming our preferred partner for commercializing them. But what…

microsoft/VibeVoice

27th April 2026 - Link Blog microsoft/VibeVoice. VibeVoice is Microsoft's Whisper-style audio model for speech-to-text, MIT licensed and with speaker diarization built into the model. Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 but I hadn't tried it until today. Here's a one-liner to run it on a Mac with uv , mlx-audio (by Prince Canuma) and the 5.71GB mlx-community/VibeVoice-ASR-4bit MLX conversion of the 17.3GB VibeVoice-ASR model, in this case against a downloaded copy of my recent podcast appearance with Lenny Rachitsky: uv run --with mlx-audio python -m mlx_audio.stt.generate \ --model mlx-community/VibeVoice-ASR-4bit \ --audio lenny.mp3 --output-path lenny \ --format json --verbose --max-tokens 32768 The tool reported back: Processing time: 524.79 seconds Prompt: 26615 tokens, 50.718 tokens-per-sec Generation: 20248 tokens, 38.585 tokens-per-sec Peak memory: 30.44 GB So that's 8 minutes 45 seconds for an hour of audio (running on a 128GB M5…

GPT-5.5 prompting guide

25th April 2026 - Link Blog GPT-5.5 prompting guide. Now that GPT-5.5 is available in the API, OpenAI have released a wealth of useful tips on how best to prompt the new model. Here's a neat trick they recommend for applications that might spend considerable time thinking before returning a user-visible response: Before any tool calls for a multi-step task, send a short user-visible update that acknowledges the request and states the first step. Keep it to one or two sentences. I've already noticed their Codex app doing this, and it does make longer running tasks feel less like the model has crashed. OpenAI suggest running the following in Codex to upgrade your existing code using advice embedded in their openai-docs skill: $openai-docs migrate this project to gpt-5.5 The upgrade guide the coding agent will follow is this one, which…

Quoting Romain Huet

25th April 2026 Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore. GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, and any task on a computer. — Romain Huet, confirming OpenAI won't release a GPT-5.5-Codex model Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

25th April 2026 @scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark: I feel like we need to stack these tests now I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS" sign of its own accord and it did - the prompt Scott used was: Create an image of a horse riding an astronaut, where the astronaut is riding a pelican that is riding a bicycle. It looks very chaotic but they all just manage to balance on top of each other Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API -…

The people do not yearn for automation

24th April 2026 - Link Blog The people do not yearn for automation (via) This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket. It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about for a long time to come. Nilay’s core idea is that people afflicted with “software brain” - who see the world as something to be automated as much as possible, and attempt to model everything in terms of information flows and data - are becoming detached from everyone else. […] software brain has ruled the business world for a long time. AI has just made it easier than ever for more people to make more software than ever before — for every kind of business to…

DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price

DeepSeek V4—almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price 24th April 2026 Chinese AI lab DeepSeek’s last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Both models are 1 million token context Mixture of Experts. Pro is 1.6T total parameters, 49B active. Flash is 284B total, 13B active. They’re using the standard MIT license. I think this makes DeepSeek-V4-Pro the new largest open weights model. It’s larger than Kimi K2.6 (1.1T) and GLM-5.1 (754B) and more than twice the size of DeepSeek V3.2 (685B). Pro is 865GB on Hugging Face, Flash is 160GB. I’m hoping that a lightly quantized Flash will run on my 128GB M5 MacBook Pro. It’s possible the Pro model may run on it…

Millisecond Converter

24th April 2026 LLM reports prompt durations in milliseconds and I got fed up of having to think about how to convert those to seconds and minutes. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

It's a big one

24th April 2026 This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

russellromney/honker

24th April 2026 - Link Blog russellromney/honker (via) "Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this: import honker db = honker.open("app.db") emails = db.queue("emails") emails.enqueue({"to": "alice@example.com"}) # Consume (in a worker process) async for job in emails.claim("worker-1"): send(job.payload) job.ack() And Kafka-style durable streams like this: stream = db.stream("user-events") with db.transaction() as tx: tx.execute("UPDATE users SET name=? WHERE id=?", [name, uid]) stream.publish({"user_id": uid, "change": "name"}, tx=tx) async for event in stream.subscribe(consumer="dashboard"): await push_to_browser(event) It also adds 20+ custom SQL functions including these two: SELECT notify('orders', '{"id":42}'); SELECT honker_stream_read_since('orders', 0, 1000); The extension requires WAL mode, and workers can poll the .db-wal file with a stat call every 1ms to…

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

24th April 2026 - Link Blog An update on recent Claude Code quality reports (via) It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems. The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the Claude Code harness caused complex but material problems which directly affected users. Anthropic's postmortem describes these in detail. This one in particular stood out to me: On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude's older thinking from sessions that had been idle for over an hour, to reduce latency when users resumed those sessions. A bug caused this to keep happening every turn for the rest of the session instead of just once, which made Claude seem forgetful and repetitive. I frequently have Claude…

Serving the For You feed

24th April 2026 - Link Blog Serving the For You feed. One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts. spacecowboy runs the For You Feed, used by around 72,000 people. This guest post on the AT Protocol blog explains how it works. The architecture is fascinating. The feed is served by a single Go process using SQLite on a "gaming" PC in spacecowboy's living room - 16 cores, 96GB of RAM and 4TB of attached NVMe storage. Recommendations are based on likes: what else are the people who like the same things as you liking on the platform? That Go server consumes the Bluesky firehose and stores the relevant details…

Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web

Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web 23rd April 2026 LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js. Spatial text parsing Refreshingly, LiteParse doesn’t use AI models to do what it does: it’s good old-fashioned PDF parsing, falling back to Tesseract OCR (or other pluggable OCR engines) for PDFs that contain images of text rather than the text itself. The hard problem that LiteParse solves is extracting text in a sensible order despite the infuriating vagaries of PDF layouts. They describe this as “spatial text parsing”—they use some very clever heuristics to detect things like multi-column layouts and group…

A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API 23rd April 2026 GPT-5.5 is out. It’s available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I’ve had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it’s hard to put into words what’s good about it—I ask it to build things and it builds exactly what I ask for! There’s one notable omission from today’s release—the API: API deployments require different safeguards and we are working closely with partners and customers on the safety and security requirements for serving it at scale. We’ll bring GPT‑5.5 and GPT‑5.5 Pro to the API very soon. When I run my pelican benchmark I always prefer to use an API, to avoid hidden system prompts in ChatGPT…

llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0

23rd April 2026 Hijacks your Codex CLI credentials to make API calls with LLM, as described in my post about GPT-5.5. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

Quoting Maggie Appleton

23rd April 2026 [...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit. — Maggie Appleton, Gathering Structures (via) Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

Quoting Bobby Holley

22nd April 2026 As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation. [...] Our experience is a hopeful one for teams who shake off the vertigo and get to work. You may need to reprioritize everything else to bring relentless and single-minded focus to the task, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are extremely proud of how our team rose to meet this challenge, and others will too. Our work isn’t finished, but we’ve turned the corner and can glimpse a future much better than just keeping up. Defenders finally have a chance to win, decisively. — Bobby Holley, CTO, Firefox Recent articles - DeepSeek…

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

22nd April 2026 - Link Blog Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model (via) Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model: Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B active MoE) across all major coding benchmarks. On Hugging Face Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is 807GB, this new Qwen3.6-27B is 55.6GB. I tried it out with the 16.8GB Unsloth Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M quantized version and llama-server using this recipe by benob on Hacker News, after first installing llama-server using brew install llama.cpp : llama-server \ -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M \ --no-mmproj \ --fit on \ -np 1 \ -c 65536 \ --cache-ram 4096 -ctxcp 2 \ --jinja \ --temp 0.6 \ --top-p 0.95 \ --top-k 20 \ --min-p 0.0 \ --presence-penalty 0.0 \ --repeat-penalty 1.0 \ --reasoning on \ --chat-template-kwargs '{"preserve_thinking": true}' On first run that…

Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans

22nd April 2026 - Link Blog Changes to GitHub Copilot Individual plans (via) On the same day as Claude Code's temporary will-they-won't-they $100/month kerfuffle (for the moment, they won't), here's the latest on GitHub Copilot pricing. Unlike Anthropic, GitHub put up an official announcement about their changes, which include tightening usage limits, pausing signups for individual plans (!), restricting Claude Opus 4.7 to the more expensive $39/month "Pro+" plan, and dropping the previous Opus models entirely. The key paragraph: Agentic workflows have fundamentally changed Copilot’s compute demands. Long-running, parallelized sessions now regularly consume far more resources than the original plan structure was built to support. As Copilot’s agentic capabilities have expanded rapidly, agents are doing more work, and more customers are hitting usage limits designed to maintain service reliability. It's easy to forget that just six months ago heavy LLM…

Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not - it's all very confusing

Is Claude Code going to cost $100/month? Probably not—it’s all very confusing 22nd April 2026 Anthropic today quietly (as in silently, no announcement anywhere at all) updated their claude.com/pricing page (but not their Choosing a Claude plan page, which shows up first for me on Google) to add this tiny but significant detail (arrow is mine, and it’s already reverted): The Internet Archive copy from yesterday shows a checkbox there. Claude Code used to be a feature of the $20/month Pro plan, but according to the new pricing page it is now exclusive to the $100/month or $200/month Max plans. Update: don’t miss the update to this post, they’ve already changed course a few hours after this change went live. So what the heck is going on? Unsurprisingly, Reddit and Hacker News and Twitter all caught fire. I didn’t believe…

Where's the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0)

Where’s the raccoon with the ham radio? (ChatGPT Images 2.0) 21st April 2026 OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 today, their latest image generation model. On the livestream Sam Altman said that the leap from gpt-image-1 to gpt-image-2 was equivalent to jumping from GPT-3 to GPT-5. Here’s how I put it to the test. My prompt: Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio gpt-image-1 First as a baseline here’s what I got from the older gpt-image-1 using ChatGPT directly: I wasn’t able to spot the raccoon—I quickly realized that testing image generation models on Where’s Waldo style images (Where’s Wally in the UK) can be pretty frustrating! I tried getting Claude Opus 4.7 with its new higher resolution inputs to solve it but it was convinced there was a raccoon it couldn’t…

Quoting Andreas Påhlsson-Notini

21st April 2026 AI agents are already too human. Not in the romantic sense, not because they love or fear or dream, but in the more banal and frustrating one. The current implementations keep showing their human origin again and again: lack of stringency, lack of patience, lack of focus. Faced with an awkward task, they drift towards the familiar. Faced with hard constraints, they start negotiating with reality. — Andreas Påhlsson-Notini, Less human AI agents, please. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles

21st April 2026 - Link Blog scosman/pelicans_riding_bicycles (via) I firmly approve of Steve Cosman's efforts to pollute the training set of pelicans riding bicycles. (To be fair, most of the examples I've published count as poisoning too.) Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

llm-openrouter 0.6

20th April 2026 llm openrouter refresh command for refreshing the list of available models without waiting for the cache to expire. I added this feature so I could try Kimi 2.6 on OpenRouter as soon as it became available there. Here's its pelican - this time as an HTML page because Kimi chose to include an HTML and JavaScript UI to control the animation. Transcript here. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

SQL functions in Google Sheets to fetch data from Datasette

20th April 2026 TIL SQL functions in Google Sheets to fetch data from Datasette — I've been experimenting with ways to fetch data from Datasette and display it in Google Sheets. I put together some notes on patterns for fetching data from a Datasette instance directly into Google Sheets - using the importdata() function, a "named function" that wraps it or a Google Apps Script if you need to send an API token in an HTTP header (not supported by importdata() .) Here's an example sheet demonstrating all three methods. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price - 24th April 2026 - Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web - 23rd April 2026 - A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API - 23rd April 2026

Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons

20th April 2026 - Link Blog Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons. I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them. As far as I can tell Claude Opus 4.7 is the first model to change the tokenizer, so it's only worth running comparisons between 4.7 and 4.6. The Claude token counting API accepts any Claude model ID though so I've included options for all four of the notable current models (Opus 4.7 and 4.6, Sonnet 4.6, and Haiku 4.5). In the Opus 4.7 announcement Anthropic said: Opus 4.7 uses an updated tokenizer that improves how the model processes text. The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens—roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. I pasted the Opus 4.7 system…

Headless everything for personal AI

19th April 2026 - Link Blog Headless everything for personal AI. Matt Webb thinks headless services are about to become much more common: Why? Because using personal AIs is a better experience for users than using services directly (honestly); and headless services are quicker and more dependable for the personal AIs than having them click round a GUI with a bot-controlled mouse. Evidently Marc Benioff thinks so too: Welcome Salesforce Headless 360: No Browser Required! Our API is the UI. Entire Salesforce & Agentforce & Slack platforms are now exposed as APIs, MCP, & CLI. All AI agents can access data, workflows, and tasks directly in Slack, Voice, or anywhere else with Salesforce Headless. If this model does take off it's going to play havoc with existing per-head SaaS pricing schemes. I'm reminded of the early 2010s era when every…

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7

Changes in the system prompt between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 18th April 2026 Anthropic are the only major AI lab to publish the system prompts for their user-facing chat systems. Their system prompt archive now dates all the way back to Claude 3 in July 2024 and it’s always interesting to see how the system prompt evolves as they publish new models. Opus 4.7 shipped the other day (April 16, 2026) with a Claude.ai system prompt update since Opus 4.6 (February 5, 2026). I had Claude Code take the Markdown version of their system prompts, break that up into separate documents for each of the models and then construct a Git history of those files over time with fake commit dates representing the publication dates of each updated prompt—here’s the prompt I used with Claude Code for the web.…

Claude system prompts as a git timeline

18th April 2026 Research Claude system prompts as a git timeline — Anthropic's published system prompt history for Claude is transformed into a git-based exploration tool, breaking up the monolithic markdown source into granular files and timestamped commits. By structuring extracted prompts per model, family, and revision, researchers can leverage `git log`, `diff`, and `blame` to trace prompt evolution, compare differences, and attribute changes to specific dates—all without manual parsing. Anthropic publish the system prompts for Claude chat and make that page available as Markdown. I had Claude Code turn that page into separate files for each model and model family with fake git commit dates to enable browsing the changes via the GitHub commit view. I used this to write my own detailed notes on the changes between Opus 4.6 and 4.7. Recent articles - DeepSeek V4 - almost…

Adding a new content type to my blog-to-newsletter tool

Guides > Agentic Engineering Patterns Adding a new content type to my blog-to-newsletter tool Here's an example of a deceptively short prompt that got a quite a lot of work done in a single shot. First, some background. I send out a free Substack newsletter around once a week containing content copied-and-pasted from my blog. I'm effectively using Substack as a lightweight way to allow people to subscribe to my blog via email. I generate the newsletter with my blog-to-newsletter tool - an HTML and JavaScript app that fetches my latest content from this Datasette instance and formats it as rich text HTML, which I can then copy to my clipboard and paste into the Substack editor. Here's a detailed explanation of how that works. I recently added a new type of content to my blog to capture content that…

datasette 1.0a28

17th April 2026 I was upgrading Datasette Cloud to 1.0a27 and discovered a nasty collection of accidental breakages caused by changes in that alpha. This new alpha addresses those directly: - Fixed a compatibility bug introduced in 1.0a27 where execute_write_fn() callbacks with a parameter name other thanconn were seeing errors. (#2691)- The database.close() method now also shuts down the write connection for that database. - New datasette.close() method for closing down all databases and resources associated with a Datasette instance. This is called automatically when the server shuts down. (#2693) - Datasette now includes a pytest plugin which automatically calls datasette.close() on temporary instances created in function-scoped fixtures and during tests. See Automatic cleanup of Datasette instances for details. This helps avoid running out of file descriptors in plugin test suites that were written before theDatabase(is_temp_disk=True) feature introduced in Datasette…

Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach - we have new AI and security tracks this year

Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach—we have new AI and security tracks this year 17th April 2026 This year’s PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It’s in Long Beach, California this year, the first time PyCon US has come to the West Coast since Portland, Oregon in 2017 and the first time in California since Santa Clara in 2013. If you’re based in California this is a great opportunity to catch up with the Python community, meet a whole lot of interesting people and learn a ton of interesting things. In addition to regular PyCon programming we have two new dedicated tracks at the conference this year: an AI track on Friday…