Simon Willison is live‑blogging the OpenAI DevDay event in Fort Mason, San Francisco, covering the keynote and other highlights. He received a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. The blog will include notes from the day’s sessions.
SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and in...
The article announces the release of llm version 0.35, which introduces a new OpenAI model named gpt-6-astra for GPT-6 Astra. It highlights the addition of this model to the llm library and tags the release with openai, llm, and gpt-6-astra.
Simon Willison has released the September edition of his sponsors‑only monthly newsletter. The issue covers new Fable class models, a pricing war, 3D graphics with Blender and pixel art, LLMs applied to mathematics, accidental cyberattacks, the vulnapocalypse affecting Datasette, his current tools, and software releases for 2026. Sponsors can access the full newsletter for $10/month, with an August preview available for free.
Simon Willison comments on GPT 6.1‑Sol, describing it as "Near‑Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price." He notes that the model’s pelican illustrations are similar to those of the GPT‑6 family and provides links to the live‑blog of the keynote and to the pelican images. The post is tagged with AI, OpenAI, generative‑AI, LLMs, and playful references to pelican‑riding‑a‑bicycle.
Simon Willison presented a closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, where he showcased a pixel‑art animation of kakapo parrots celebrating a record‑breaking breeding season in 2026. He used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate the animation from Google‑searched kakapo photos, then employed Claude Code with Playwright to record a 15‑second video of the animated HTML5 canvas, which he embedded in his Keynote slide.
Simon Willison announces that the August edition of his sponsors‑only monthly newsletter is now available. The issue covers topics such as OpenAI’s accidental cyberattacks, new game releases, Claude auto mode, ChatGPT work model updates, and miscellaneous projects and tools he’s using. A preview of the July newsletter is also provided, and sponsors can access the full content for $10 per month.
The API has zero authorisations checks on cancelling other people's reservations … I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through. So you've moved from #4 to #3 already.
The article announces that Claude Code will now support AGENTS.md files starting with version 2.1.277. If a CLAUDE.md file is absent in a folder, Claude will automatically look for and use AGENTS.md, leveraging Claude Code mods to customize the harness. The built‑in mod is available for use, and users can also create their own custom project instructions.
The article reflects on the shift in perspective after the release of Fable, a new model that promised to solve many coding challenges at a comparable or lower cost. Prior to Fable, developers felt it was pointless to invest heavily in coding tools or context strategies, as newer models would likely render them obsolete. However, Fable’s performance was so impressive that, despite its high cost, it prompted a reevaluation of how work was distributed across different models such as Opus, 5.6, K3, and GLM.
The article discusses how production code generated by Claude, Anthropic’s AI, should meet higher standards than human-written code. Anthropic enforces this through numerous guardrails such as lint rules, extensive testing, Claude-driven end‑to‑end tests, daily fuzzers, automated code and security reviews, and automated refactoring. These measures aim to prevent the code from becoming difficult to maintain.
Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar apps back in March , and I'm still using both of those on a daily basis.
Qwen 3. 8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.