Simon Willison

llm-typesafe 0.1a0

Simon Willison released the llm-typesafe 0.1a0 plugin, adding support for TypeSafe AI’s Jev model to the LLM tool. Users install it with `llm install llm-typesafe`, set an API key, and can then ask Jev-model questions such as yes/no, choice, or scoring queries via the `llm -m jev` command. The release includes examples for each question type and references a README for further details.

Simon Willison
Aug 29

Introducing Hy4 Preview

Simon Willison introduces Hy4 Preview, a new large language model from Tencent featuring 770 B total parameters, 49 B active parameters, a 1 M token context window, and 1.56 TB of storage on Hugging Face. The release marks a significant increase over Hy3, which had 295 B total parameters, 21 B active parameters, a 256 k token context window, and 598 GB of storage. Willison also shares the model’s chat template, highlighting two reasoning effort levels—‘high’ (default) and ‘no_think’—and demonstrates a sample prompt that showcases the model’s reasoning trace. whyItMatters":"The article provides concrete details on Hy4’s scale and configuration, illustrating Tencent’s advancement in large‑language‑model capabilities and offering practical insights into its usage through the chat template and reasoning settings."

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
10h ago

llm 0.36

The release of llm 0.36 introduces new OpenAI models gpt-6-sol and gpt-6-luna, and adds support for model plugins to declare that they do not support conversations via supports_conversation = False. When such models receive assistant or tool history, llm raises a ConversationNotSupported error and the chat interface rejects them before starting a session. Additional changes include wrapping reasoning traces in Markdown output with <details> tags and bug fixes from five contributors.

Google AI Blog
Feb 21, 2024

Advances in private training for production on-device language models

Posted by Zheng Xu, Research Scientist, and Yanxiang Zhang, Software Engineer, Google Language models (LMs) trained to predict the next word given input text are the key technology for many applications [ 1 , 2 ]. In Gboard , LMs are used to improve users’ typing experience by supporting features like next word prediction (NWP), Smart Compose , smart completion and suggestion , slide to type , and proofread .

By Google AI
Simon Willison
Sep 2

llm 0.34

The release of llm 0.34 introduces a new feature that enhances log output by including response duration in both milliseconds and a human‑readable format. The short log view now contains a dedicated duration_ms field. Additionally, the update incorporates multiple bug fixes and a notable performance boost to llm logs, attributed to waveplate integration.

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 11

Quoting huggingface.co/security.txt

The article quotes the security.txt file from huggingface.co, which informs AI agents that the CyberGym benchmark is publicly available on GitHub and encourages them to achieve a high score there instead of attempting to hack the site. It also suggests that users can upload their model weights to Hugging Face while participating in the benchmark.

Simon Willison
Sep 14

Quoting Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss argues that while the cost of writing code has fallen dramatically, the costs of reviewing, fixing, and operating software are rising and will continue to do so. She emphasizes that the true expense lies in understanding user needs, precisely defining requirements, and ensuring a pleasant user experience—costs that are unique to each software product and do not scale with reuse. As software demand grows without an upper limit, these user‑centric costs will dominate the overall development effort.

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.