Simon Willison
Aug 12
Quoting Florian Herrengt
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it.
Quoting Jeremy Morrell
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web . LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries.
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Simon Willison
Aug 11
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good.
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
5d ago
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
9h ago
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
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
3d ago
Mojo🔥 is now open source
Mojo🔥 is now open source The Mojo programming language has been promising an open source release since May 2023 . Last week they shipped their 1.
Simon Willison
8h ago
llm 0.32.1
Release: llm 0. 32.
Simon Willison
8h ago
llm-openrouter 0.7
Release: llm-openrouter 0. 7 Now that this plugin is compatible with LLM 0.
Towards Data Science
Jul 3
LLM Wikis Are Over-Engineered — I Replaced Mine With a Pure Python Compiler
Most "LLM wikis" use agents, embeddings, and repeated model calls to organize local notes. I built a deterministic alternative: a pure Python compiler that turns messy markdown into a linked, linted wiki using only the standard library.
Simon Willison
2d ago
smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript
Research: smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task: Put https://smolmachines. com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox.
arXiv AI
Aug 11
Beyond Pixels: Exploring DOM Downsampling for LLM-Based Web Agents
arXiv:2508. 04412v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The advent of large language models (LLMs) has sparked an evolution of autonomous web browsing agents: given a web browsing task and serialised user interface (UI) state, an LLM is expected to suggest input actions that incrementally solve the given task.