Simon Willison

llm-anthropic 0.29

The article announces the release of llm‑anthropic version 0.29. It introduces support for the Claude Opus 5.5 model, allowing users to invoke it with the command line syntax `llm -m claude-opus-5.5 "prompt goes here"`. The release is tagged under llm and anthropic.

Simon Willison
Sep 2

Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics

Anthropic has released the system prompts for its Claude consumer applications, including historic changes and an index structure that allows easy diffing of prompts. The latest update, seen in Fable 5.1, adds a comprehensive rule that Claude will not reproduce song lyrics, poems, or copyrighted passages, and will refuse any reworded requests thereafter, offering analysis instead. The prompts are accessible in Markdown via the platform.claude.com/docs site, facilitating transparent tracking of policy changes.

Simon Willison
4d ago

Quoting Thariq Shihipar

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.

Simon Willison
Sep 11

Quoting Boris Cherny

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.

Simon Willison
Sep 2

llm-anthropic 0.28

The release of llm-anthropic 0.28 introduces support for Claude Fable 5.1, enabling default display of reasoning traces for compatible models. It also adds a new llm_anthropic.ClaudeRefusal exception to handle cases where Claude returns a refusal. These updates enhance debugging and error handling for users of the library.

Simon Willison
Aug 23

Quoting Drew Breunig

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.

Simon Willison
Aug 24

llm-anthropic 0.27

The release of llm‑anthropic 0.27 updates the Anthropic plugin for LLM to be compatible with the newly released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which has switched from httpx to httpx2. This mirrors a similar change made by OpenAI in their v3.0.0 release two weeks prior. The update includes a migration guide and a pull request that ensures tests pass after upgrading to anthropic>=1.

Simon Willison
Aug 10

Quoting OpenClaw (running Opus 4.6)

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.

Simon Willison
Aug 16

Markdown SVG upgrades

I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May , but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents.

Simon Willison
5d ago

How To Write With An LLM

The article "How To Write With An LLM" by Thomas Ptacek explains how to use large language models (LLMs) as copyeditors rather than writing assistants. Ptacek advocates a strict rule: never use any single word or phrase suggested by an LLM, treating it as intellectual personal protective equipment. He shares his own practice of using LLMs for fact‑checking, spelling, grammar, and occasional thesaurus help, and provides a screenshot of his personal LLM copyediting tool along with a prompt to help readers build their own.