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Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today
One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, …
Simon Willison
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Visit simonwillison.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2009 – Nov 2026
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2
Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code
PR by Xuan-Son Nguyen for llama.cpp: This PR provides a big jump in speed for WASM by leveraging SIMD instructions for qX_K_q8_K and qX_0_q8_0 dot product functions. Surprisingly, 99% of …
3
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of …
4
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
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 …
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The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy
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 …
6
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 …
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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 …
8
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.
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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 …
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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 …
11
Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day—the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant …
12
Using GPT-3 to explain how code works
One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast …
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Writing code is cheap now
Writing code is cheap now - Agentic Engineering Patterns
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Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination—usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full …
15
Google's new pipe syntax in SQL
A new paper from Google Research describing custom syntax for analytical SQL queries that has been rolling out inside Google since February, reaching 1,600 "seven-day-active users" by August 2024. A …
16
Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub
GitHub quietly released a new feature at some point in the past few days: profile READMEs. Create a repository with the same name as your GitHub account (in my case …
17
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world. Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes. Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus …
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Designing agentic loops
Coding agents like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI represent a genuine step change in how useful LLMs can be for producing working code. These agents can now directly …
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I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours
I wrote about JustHTML yesterday—Emil Stenström’s project to build a new standards compliant HTML5 parser in pure Python code using coding agents running against the comprehensive html5lib-tests testing library. Last …
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Fun with Unix domain sockets
A small enhancement to Datasette this week: I’ve added support for proxying via Unix domain sockets. This started out as a feature request from Aslak Raanes: #1388: Serve using UNIX …
21
Using a self-rewriting README powered by GitHub Actions to track TILs
I’ve started tracking TILs—Today I Learneds—inspired by this five-year-and-counting collection by Josh Branchaud on GitHub (found via Hacker News). I’m keeping mine in GitHub too, and using GitHub Actions to …
22
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 …
23
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 …
24
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 …
25
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. …
26
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, …
27
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, …
28
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 …
29
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 …
30
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 …