31
Storing Times for Human Events
I’ve worked on various event websites in the past, and one of the unintuitively difficult problems that inevitably comes up is the best way to store the time that an …
Simon Willison
On coding-agents 264 llms 2,013 ai-ethics 346 claude-code 134 datasette-agent 23 ...
- Popular posts
- 189
- Total points
- 70,682
- HN comments
- 39,665
- Rank
- #3 personal
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
Reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican
OpenAI partially released a new model yesterday called GPT-5-Codex-Mini, which they describe as "a more compact and cost-efficient version of GPT-5-Codex". It’s currently only available via their Codex CLI tool …
33
What is agentic engineering?
What is agentic engineering? - Agentic Engineering Patterns
34
Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is an LLM that can code well that runs on my Mac
There’s a whole lot of buzz around the new Qwen2.5-Coder Series of open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) LLM releases from Alibaba’s Qwen research team. On first impression it looks like …
35
Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette
Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I’m going to expand on …
36
PAGNIs: Probably Are Gonna Need Its (2021)
Luke Page has a great post up with his list of YAGNI exceptions. YAGNI—You Ain’t Gonna Need It—is a rule that says you shouldn’t add a feature just because it …
37
Hacking around with the ScotRail audio announcements
Scottish train operator ScotRail released a two-hour long MP3 file containing all of the components of its automated station announcements. Messing around with them is proving to be a huge …
38
Notes on streaming large API responses
I started a Twitter conversation last week about API endpoints that stream large amounts of data as an alternative to APIs that return 100 results at a time and require …
39
Datasette-ripgrep: a regular expression search engine for your source code
This week I built datasette-ripgrep—a web application for running regular expression searches against source code, built on top of the amazing ripgrep command-line tool. datasette-ripgrep demo I’ve deployed a demo …
40
Joining CSV and JSON data with an in-memory SQLite database
The new sqlite-utils memory command can import CSV and JSON data directly into an in-memory SQLite database, combine and query it using SQL and output the results as CSV, JSON …
41
/usr/bin/env -S uv run
This is a really neat pattern. Start your Python script like this: #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run # /// script # requires-python = ">=3.12" # dependencies = [ # "flask==3.*", # …
42
Things I've learned about building CLI tools in Python
I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up …
43
Ultrathink is a Claude Code magic word
Extensive new documentation from Anthropic on how to get the best results out of their Claude Code CLI coding agent tool, which includes this fascinating tip: We recommend using the …
44
Why I like Redis
I’ve been getting a lot of useful work done with Redis recently. Redis is typically categorised as yet another of those new-fangled NoSQL key/value stores, but if you look closer …
45
Running Python code in a sandbox with MicroPython and WASM
I’ve been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics …
46
Bundling binary tools in Python wheels
I spotted a new (to me) pattern which I think is pretty interesting: projects are bundling compiled binary applications as part of their Python packaging wheels. I think it’s really …
47
Building a Desktop Application for Datasette
This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and …
48
My process for building a feature
I’m maintaining a lot of different projects at the moment. I thought it would be useful to describe the process I use for adding a new feature to one of …
49
Slides and notes from my three hour Redis tutorial
These slides and notes were originally written to accompany a three hour Redis tutorial I gave at the NoSQL Europe conference on the 22nd of April 2010.
50
Lessons I learned building an MPs' expenses crowdsourcing app for the Guardian
As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team …
51
Djng - a Django powered microframework
djng is nearly two weeks old now, so it’s about time I wrote a bit about the project. I presented a keynote at EuroDjangoCon in Prague earlier this month entitled …
52
Django ponies: Proposals for Django 1.2
I’ve decided to step up my involvement in Django development in the run-up to Django 1.2, so I’m currently going through several years worth of accumulated pony requests figuring out …
53
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)
Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …