Simon Willison
25 stories
Simon WillisonVoicesIntroducing GPT-6 Astra for developers Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers Blink and you'll miss it, but there's a familiar creature at 1m59s : Across the board, Astra has more attention to detail, better understanding of the user's prompt, and can build m
Simon WillisonVoicesUsing Blender with coding agents on macOS TIL: Using Blender with coding agents on macOS I've been having fun with Blender in ChatGPT Codex on my Mac recently. Getting it to work with coding agents is really easy: install the full Mac application from blender.or
Simon WillisonVoicesThe Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I render
Simon Willison
Simon WillisonVoicesOpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This
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Simon WillisonVoicesAugust newsletter is out The August edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: We got more details on OpenAl's accidental cyberattacks One-
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Simon WillisonVoicesGPT‑6 Astra GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is "rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API a
Simon WillisonVoicesllm-gemini 0.34 Release: llm-gemini 0.34 New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash , with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146 Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version. Thanks, Charlie Tonneslan . #
Simon WillisonVoicesClaude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications ( Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the
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Simon WillisonVoicesQuoting Rick Brewster Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has
Simon WillisonVoicesClaude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day . Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on sc
Simon WillisonVoicesCodex bundles 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 there in a folder called codex-p
Simon WillisonVoicesGeoJSON Map Viewer Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council ) and found a need to display some GeoJSON fil
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Simon WillisonVoicesQuoting Tarn Adams They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior , and they misbehave sometimes — Tarn Adams , co-creator of Dwarf Fortress T
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Simon WillisonVoicesdatasette-mcp 0.2 Release: datasette-mcp 0.2 "rows" from execute_sql is now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which colum
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Simon WillisonVoicesPython 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phas
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Simon WillisonVoicesIntroducing wrapture Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt , mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and tra
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Simon WillisonVoicesQuoting Andrew Digby 325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible wi
Simon WillisonVoicesUnderstanding ChatGPT Work OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is a
Simon WillisonVoicesIntroducing Hy4 Preview Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face . This is a big size in
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Simon WillisonVoicesJust a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat alarming post he repo
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Simon WillisonVoicesBreaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default a
Simon WillisonVoicesQwen3.8-Flash-Next Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4". It's pretty big: 125B parameters but only 6B active wh
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Simon WillisonVoicesQuoting Paul Dix The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowin
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Simon WillisonVoicesEVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins! EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins! EVE Online has been one of the most interesting case studies in Python at scale for over twenty years now. They've been running on Stackless Python since their launch in 2003, and
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