121
SQL as an API language
Datasette (previously) is my open source tool for exploring and publishing structured data. There are a lot of ideas embedded in Datasette. I realized that I haven’t put many of …
Simon Willison
On coding-agents 264 llms 2,013 ai-ethics 346 claude-code 134 datasette-agent 23 ...
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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
122
Training is not the same as chatting: LLMs don’t remember everything you say
I’m beginning to suspect that one of the most common misconceptions about LLMs such as ChatGPT involves how “training” works. A common complaint I see about these tools is that …
123
The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection
I really want an AI assistant: a Large Language Model powered chatbot that can answer questions and perform actions for me based on access to my private data and tools. …
124
ChatGPT as a Calculator for Words
One of the most pervasive mistakes I see people using with large language model tools like ChatGPT is trying to use them as a search engine. As with other LLM …
125
Getting DeepSeek-OCR working on an Nvidia Spark via brute force with Claude Code
DeepSeek released a new model yesterday: DeepSeek-OCR, a 6.6GB model fine-tuned specifically for OCR. They released it as model weights that run using PyTorch and CUDA. I got it running …
126
Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the LLM-replicate plugin
The big news today is Llama 2, the new openly licensed Large Language Model from Meta AI. It’s a really big deal: Llama 2 is available for free for research …
127
The Perfect Commit
For the last few years I’ve been trying to center my work around creating what I consider to be the Perfect Commit. This is a single commit that contains all …
128
Cross-Database Queries in SQLite
I released Datasette 0.55 and sqlite-utils 3.6 this week with a common theme across both releases: supporting cross-database joins. Cross-database queries in Datasette SQLite databases are single files on disk. …
129
Node.js is genuinely exciting
I gave a talk on Friday at Full Frontal, a new one day JavaScript conference in my home town of Brighton. I ended up throwing away my intended topic (JSONP, …
130
Llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer
Mozilla’s innovation group and Justine Tunney just released llamafile, and I think it’s now the single best way to get started running Large Language Models (think your own local copy …
131
Catching up on the weird world of LLMs
I gave a talk on Sunday at North Bay Python where I attempted to summarize the last few years of development in the space of LLMs—Large Language Models, the technology …
132
Notes on the SQLite DuckDB Paper
SQLite: Past, Present, and Future is a newly published paper authored by Kevin P. Gaffney, Martin Prammer and Jignesh M. Patel from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and D. Richard Hipp, …
133
Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm
Searching Google Scholar for "certainly, here is" turns up a huge number of academic papers that include parts that were evidently written by ChatGPT - sections that start with "Certainly, …
134
Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now
The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It’s an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger …
135
Nvidia DGX Spark: great hardware, early days for the ecosystem
NVIDIA sent me a preview unit of their new DGX Spark desktop “AI supercomputer”. I’ve never had hardware to review before! You can consider this my first ever sponsored post …
136
Scaling long-running autonomous coding
Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from …
137
Trying out Gemini 3 Pro with audio transcription and a new pelican benchmark
Google released Gemini 3 Pro today. Here’s the announcement from Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, their developer blog announcement from Logan Kilpatrick, the Gemini 3 Pro Model Card, …
138
Notes on the new Claude analysis JavaScript code execution tool
Anthropic released a new feature for their Claude.ai consumer-facing chat bot interface today which they’re calling “the analysis tool”. It’s their answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode: Claude can …
139
Embracing the parallel coding agent lifestyle
For a while now I’ve been hearing from engineers who run multiple coding agents at once—firing up several Claude Code or Codex CLI instances at the same time, sometimes in …
140
Things I've learned serving on the board of the Python Software Foundation
Two years ago I was elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation—the PSF. I recently returned from the annual PSF board retreat (this one was in …
141
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 …
142
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 …
143
AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff
I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the …
144
What is agentic engineering?
What is agentic engineering? - Agentic Engineering Patterns
145
Stealing everything you've ever typed on your Windows Recall PC is now possible
Recall is a new feature in Windows 11 which takes a screenshot every few seconds, runs local device OCR on it and stores the resulting text in a SQLite database. …
146
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 …
147
How to implement Q&A against your docs with GPT3 embeddings and Datasette
If you’ve spent any time with GPT-3 or ChatGPT, you’ve likely thought about how useful it would be if you could point them at a specific, current collection of text …
148
LLM Python/CLI tool adds support for embeddings
LLM is my Python library and command-line tool for working with language models. I just released LLM 0.9 with a new set of features that extend LLM to provide tools …
149
Analytics: Hacker News v.s. a tweet from Elon Musk
My post Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first” really took off. It sat at the top of Hacker News for a full day, and is …
150
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 …