Simon Willison

Quoting Felix Rieseberg

The article explains the transition from the original Cowork system, which ran model inference and tool calls in a local Anthropic VM, to a new cloud‑based version that hosts both inference and the VM. The new design isolates each session in its own sandbox, eliminates local resource drain, and allows file access through the desktop app, addressing concerns about battery usage, performance, and continuity when a laptop is closed.

Simon Willison
Sep 16

Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

Claude Cowork and the standard chat interface are merging into a single Claude experience, allowing users to hand over tasks or ask quick questions that the system will continue to handle even after the laptop is closed. The rollout will begin with Pro and Max plan users across web, desktop, and mobile, and will extend to new users on these plans over the coming weeks. This integration suggests Claude is evolving into a general agent, simplifying the distinction between Cowork and regular Claude usage.

Simon Willison
Aug 30

Understanding ChatGPT Work

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work on July 9, offering two distinct products: Work Cloud, accessed via chatgpt.com or the mobile apps, and Work Local, available through the desktop app that can run programs on a user’s computer. Work Cloud is a paid‑only feature for $20/month and up subscribers, providing advanced capabilities such as code execution with internet access, a headless Chrome browser, and a persistent filesystem across sessions. The author notes that while ChatGPT Work claims to be better for tasks with clear outcomes, many users find the distinction unnecessary and prefer the standard Chat interface for most use cases.

Simon Willison
Aug 22

Quoting Linus Torvalds

The article recounts a challenging debug session that was significantly aided by an AI assistant. Despite the AI initially claiming the problem was unsolvable and suggesting a report be written instead, it persisted, adding debug code and analyzing it as the author pushed forward. Ultimately, the author credits the AI with writing the commit message for the fix.

Simon Willison
Aug 21

Stop Making TUIs

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.

Simon Willison
Sep 25

Quoting John Gruber

The article discusses Meta’s new AI system, Muse, which offers each user a persistent Linux VM in the cloud and is marketed as an easy-to-use, consumer‑friendly agentic AI. It highlights the system’s technical innovation and the company’s packaging as a cute mascot, while noting that users may not fully grasp the power and potential danger of such an advanced tool, especially when running it locally on a Mac.

Simon Willison
Sep 16

datasette 1.0a40

The article announces the release of Datasette 1.0a40, which includes a security fix identical to that in version 0.65.5, new features such as the ability for plugins to launch and manage background tasks via the datasette.add_background_task() method, and a migration to httpx2 to support features like datasette.client.get(). The update also contains numerous bug fixes, many of which were addressed during a recent triage effort for the upcoming 1.0 stable release.

Simon Willison
Aug 9

GitHub Models is now retired

GitHub Models is now retired I missed this news until today, when the GitHub Actions run for my simonw/research repository failed with this error message: GitHub Models is temporarily unavailable as part of a scheduled retirement brownout. That message is already stale, because the retirement has been completed.

Google AI Blog
Jan 31, 2024

MobileDiffusion: Rapid text-to-image generation on-device

Posted by Yang Zhao, Senior Software Engineer, and Tingbo Hou, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Core ML Text-to-image diffusion models have shown exceptional capabilities in generating high-quality images from text prompts. However, leading models feature billions of parameters and are consequently expensive to run, requiring powerful desktops or servers (e.

By Google AI
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.