Simon Willison

Redesigning source control at Anthropic

Anthropic redesigned its source control system, creating a custom alternative called Scion to replace Git. The change was driven by a dramatic rise in code changes—from about 2,500 per day in May 2026 to over 30,000 per day by September—requiring a system that could handle a 100 GB main‑branch history and 25 million daily checkouts. Scion was built by a seven‑person team, migrated from Git in five months, and includes a new code‑review system named Antique, while offline support was deemed unnecessary due to Claude’s constant online use.

Simon Willison
Sep 6

Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI

The article discusses OpenAI’s focus on Recursive Self‑Improvement (RSI), which the author suggests may represent a new form of AGI. It highlights how OpenAI’s research team is employing coding agents and notes a significant rise in AI spending per researcher in late July, likely linked to internal access to a model later released as GPT‑6 Astra. The piece references related essays and includes a chart illustrating the growth of agentic engineering at OpenAI.

Simon Willison
Sep 2

llm-gemini 0.34

The release of llm-gemini 0.34 introduces the new Gemini 3.8‑Flash model, available in low, medium, and high thinking levels, and fixes an issue where async responses failed to record the resolved model version. The update also notes that Google has released Gemini 3.8‑Flash (and a restricted 3.8 Flash Cyber version) today, with example outputs (pelicans) demonstrating the model’s performance across the different thinking levels. The author highlights Gemini Flash’s speed, low cost, and competence in generating HTML, JavaScript, and Markdown‑SVG content, citing a 13‑second, 1.8‑cent example of an HTML output.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

SpecMine: A Large-Scale Corpus of Spec-Driven Development Artifacts

SpecMine is a large-scale corpus that documents Spec-Driven Development (SDD) artifacts in public GitHub repositories. It includes a broad census of 470,795 spec files from 73,030 repositories linked to 17 tools, a focused census of 98,574 Kiro layout files from 12,910 repositories, and a sweep of 5,992 pull requests across 581 repositories that modify specs. The dataset provides enriched metadata, full commit histories, parsed document structures, and over 2.4 million typed references connecting specs to code, sibling documents, PRs, branches, and issues.

By Shyam Agarwal, Anmol Singhal, Travis Breaux, Bogdan Vasilescu
Simon Willison
Oct 1

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...

Simon Willison
Sep 22

Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war

The article reports the release of new AI models: Claude Opus 5.5 by Anthropic and GPT‑6 Sol and GPT‑6 Luna by OpenAI, noting that GPT‑6 variants are priced at half the cost of their GPT‑5.6 counterparts. It provides a detailed pricing table comparing input, cached input, and output costs across several models, highlighting how GPT‑6 Luna is among the cheapest ever offered by OpenAI. The author also comments on visual differences in model outputs, noting that GPT‑6 outputs are more muted compared to GPT‑5.6.

Simon Willison
Sep 1

Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican

The article discusses Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 release, highlighting its claimed improvements in coding, knowledge work, and problem‑solving, particularly a 52.6% score on the new Terminal‑Bench‑Science 0.1 benchmark. The author examines the model’s performance on the pelican benchmark, noting that Fable 5.1’s five reasoning levels (low, medium, high, xhigh, max) sometimes skip reasoning entirely for certain prompts, as evidenced by token counts and cost metrics. The piece provides detailed transcript data for each reasoning level when generating an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle.

Simon Willison
Oct 13

llm-gemini 0.35

The article announces the release of llm‑gemini 0.35, adding support for the new Gemini 4 Argon model available through the Gemini API and for customers on the $100/month subscription plan. It highlights Argon’s pricing—$2/million input and $10/million output at launch, with a planned price increase on December 1st—and compares its cost-effectiveness to other models, noting it remains cheaper than many competitors even after the increase. The post also showcases example SVG outputs and creative illustrations generated by Argon, such as a pelican riding a bicycle and an armadillo in fishnet tights on Mars.

Simon Willison
Sep 14

commit-rewriter 0.1

Simon Willison released commit-rewriter 0.1, a web app that lets users edit commit messages for a repository. The tool is useful for cleaning up commits that contain internal references or unwanted code before publication. After editing, it creates a timestamped branch to preserve the original state and rewrites the selected commits.

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
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.