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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects
The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. As an experienced developer, ChatGPT …
Simon Willison
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Visit simonwillison.net → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2009 – Nov 2026
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Interesting ideas in Observable Framework
Mike Bostock, Announcing: Observable Framework: Today we’re launching Observable 2.0 with a bold new vision: an open-source static site generator for building fast, beautiful data apps, dashboards, and reports. Our …
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Useful patterns for building HTML tools
I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to …
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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 …
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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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Video scraping: extracting JSON from a 35s screen capture for 1/10th of a cent
The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails. I didn’t particularly feel like copying and pasting all of …
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Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in the browser
I attended the Story Discovery At Scale data journalism conference at Stanford this week. One of the perennial hot topics at any journalism conference concerns data extraction: how can we …
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One Year of TILs
Just over a year ago I started tracking TILs, inspired by Josh Branchaud’s collection. I’ve since published 148 TILs across 43 different topics. It’s a great format! TIL stands for …
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Datasette’s new JSON write API: The first alpha of Datasette 1.0
This week I published the first alpha release of Datasette 1.0, with a significant new feature: Datasette core now includes a JSON API for creating and dropping tables and inserting, …
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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 …
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Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder
I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and …
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Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos
According to the Apple Photos internal SQLite database, this is the most aesthetically pleasing photograph I have ever taken of a pelican: Here’s the SQL query that found me my …
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Many options for running Mistral models in your terminal using LLM
Mistral AI is the most exciting AI research lab at the moment. They’ve now released two extremely powerful smaller Large Language Models under an Apache 2 license, and have a …
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Datasette.io, an official project website for Datasette
This week I launched datasette.io—the new official project website for Datasette. Datasette’s first open source release was just over three years ago, but until now the official site duties have …
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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 …
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CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs
I’ve been building out a small suite of command-line tools for working with ChatGPT, GPT-4 and potentially other language models in the future. The three tools I’ve built so far …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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Language models on the command line
I gave a talk about accessing Large Language Models from the command-line last week as part of the Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists six week long …
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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 …
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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 …
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/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.*", # …
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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 …