Simon Willison
5d ago
pwasm 0.2a0
Release: pwasm 0.2a0 pwasm is one of my folly projects - an entirely vibe-coded pure Python WebAssembly engine that I built in January during my first bout of AI mania. I hadn't touched it sin...
A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView
Research: A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1. 4's new Bun.
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Simon Willison
Aug 25
EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
EVE Online is beginning its transition to Python 3, a move that will involve using the futurize script on 2.4 million lines of code and a manual review of about 20,000 differences between Python 2 and Python 3. The company has historically run on Stackless Python since 2003, with the last major upgrade in 2010 to Stackless Python 2.7. While the announcement does not detail how Stackless will be replaced, the team previously showcased a shift away from Stackless in their Carbon engine for EVE Frontier, leveraging the open‑source carbonengine/scheduler library.
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
Sep 7
Creepy crawlies
Konstantin Ryabitsev highlights the growing problem of abusive web crawlers that consume excessive CPU resources on git.kernel.org, the official Git repository for the Linux kernel. He notes that at any given moment, 14 CPU cores across five geo‑distributed nodes are dedicated solely to rendering git commits as HTML for these scrapers, surpassing the CPU usage for all legitimate access such as git clones. This issue raises concerns for services like Datasette, which also serve large numbers of crawlable web pages.
Simon Willison
Sep 10
Any Nix package, live in your browser
Farid Zakaria’s trynix.dev lets users run any Nix package from the past 13 years inside a browser‑based x86_64 Linux VM powered by QEMU‑WASM. By providing URL‑addressable packages, a user can simply navigate to a link such as https://trynix.dev/?pkg=python3%403.6.2, click "Load," and obtain an interactive shell running that specific package. The platform is also integrated with GitHub Actions, enabling pull‑request reviews that launch the PR’s build directly in the browser via trynix-preview.
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
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
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.
Simon Willison
Sep 23
We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary
My comment on We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary — Hacker News.I've been wanting this from Cloudflare for years. The classic problem here is if you do that thing where us...
Simon Willison
Sep 10
Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify
Shopify has decided to move away from React Native and return to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases for its native mobile apps. The company originally adopted React Native in 2020 to avoid duplicating work, enable cross‑stack development, and reduce feature parity overhead, but has since found that modern coding agents can handle much of the implementation, translation, testing, and review work, making native development less of a bottleneck. Shopify also maintains several React Native libraries—react‑native‑skia, flash‑list, and restyle—though the latter will be archived by the end of 2026.
Simon Willison
Aug 28
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
The article reports that rumors of bugs in open‑source projects now trigger rapid security exploits, with automated agents probing for vulnerabilities within minutes of a patch being discussed. Anil Madhavapeddy demonstrates how modern coding agents can exploit even minimal hints, and rclone maintainer Nick Craig‑Wood notes a dramatic spike in security disclosures and delayed CVE assignments. The post highlights the need for new processes to protect open‑source communities from swift exploitation.
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.