31
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
Here’s a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I’m talking about the …
Simon Willison
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Visit simonwillison.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2009 – Nov 2026
AI & Machine Learning 118Software Engineering 53Tools & Productivity 36Society, Policy & Culture 22Databases & Data 18Tech Industry & Business 16
32
GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and system card
I’ve had preview access to the new GPT-5 model family for the past two weeks (see related video and my disclosures) and have been using GPT-5 as my daily-driver. It’s …
33
Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result …
34
Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing
I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, …
35
Open source projects should run office hours
Back in December I decided to try something new for my Datasette open source project: Datasette Office Hours. The idea is simple: anyone can book a 25 minute conversation with …
36
Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
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 …
37
OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened
This story is wild. The short version: OpenAI were running a cybersecurity test against an unreleased model, with the model’s guardrail features turned off. Rather than solve the test, the …
38
OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI
One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just …
39
My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)
I wrote about the new GLM-4.5 model family yesterday—new open weight (MIT licensed) models from Z.ai in China which their benchmarks claim score highly in coding even against models such …
40
We need to tell people ChatGPT will lie to them, not debate linguistics
ChatGPT lies to people. This is a serious bug that has so far resisted all attempts at a fix. We need to prioritize helping people understand this, not debating the …
41
Agentic Engineering Patterns
Patterns for getting the best results out of coding agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. See my introduction for more on this project.
42
An LLM is a lossy encyclopedia
Since I love collecting questionable analogies for LLMs, here's a new one I just came up with: an LLM is a lossy encyclopedia. They have a huge array of facts …
43
Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript
I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher …
44
Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?
The biggest announcement from last week’s OpenAI DevDay (and there were a LOT of announcements) was GPTs. Users of ChatGPT Plus can now create their own, custom GPT chat bots …
45
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of 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 …
46
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel
I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast? Brenda. Who is …
47
Anthropic: "Applicants should not use AI assistants"
While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process. We …
48
Git scraping: track changes over time by scraping to a Git repository
Git scraping is the name I’ve given a scraping technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now. It’s really effective, and more people should use it. Update …
49
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on my laptop drew me a better pelican than Claude Opus 4.7
For anyone who has been (inadvisably) taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning’s two big model …
50
Prompt injection: what’s the worst that can happen?
Activity around building sophisticated applications on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as GPT-3/4/ChatGPT/etc is growing like wildfire right now. Many of these applications are potentially vulnerable to prompt …
51
ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files
One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was …
52
"A computer can never be held accountable"
This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI. A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a …
53
Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and …
54
Timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face
OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about “the Hugging Face Incident” (previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It’s short and information …
55
CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook
Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided …
56
Understanding GPT tokenizers
Large language models such as GPT-3/4, LLaMA and PaLM work in terms of tokens. They take text, convert it into tokens (integers), then predict which tokens should come next. Playing …
57
Could you train a ChatGPT-beating model for $85k and run it in a browser?
I think it’s now possible to train a large language model with similar functionality to GPT-3 for $85,000. And I think we might soon be able to run the resulting …
58
My Lethal Trifecta talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup
I gave a talk on Wednesday at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup about prompt injection, the lethal trifecta and the challenges of securing systems that use MCP. It wasn’t …
59
The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
I’ve been dipping into the r/ChatGPT subreddit recently to see how people are reacting to the GPT-5 launch, and so far the vibes there are not good. This AMA thread …
60
How to set up continuous deployment using free hosted tools
I’m going to describe a way to put together a world-class continuous deployment infrastructure for your side-project without spending any money. With continuous deployment every code commit is tested against …