datasette-showboat

Datasette plugin for SHOWBOAT_REMOTE_URL

Rodney and Claude Code for Desktop

I'm a very heavy user of Claude Code on the web, Anthropic's excellent but poorly named cloud version of Claude Code where everything runs in a container environment managed by them, greatly reducing the risk of anything bad happening to a computer I care about. I don't use the web interface at all

The AI Vampire

The AI Vampire Steve Yegge's take on agent fatigue, and its relationship to burnout. Let's pretend you're the only person at your company using AI. In Scenario A, you decide you're going to impress your employer, and work for 8 hours a day at 10x productivity. You knock it out of the park and make

Em dash

I'm occasionally accused of using LLMs to write the content on my blog. I don't do that, and I don't think my writing has much of an LLM smell to it... with one notable exception: # Finally, do em dashes s = s.replace(' - ', u'\u2014') That code to add em dashes to my posts dates back to at

Deep Blue

We coined a new term on the Oxide and Friends podcast last month (primary credit to Adam Leventhal) covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work. We're calling i

Gwtar: a static efficient single-file HTML format

Gwtar: a static efficient single-file HTML format Fascinating new project from Gwern Branwen and Said Achmiz that targets the challenge of combining large numbers of assets into a single archived HTML file without that file being inconvenient to view in a browser. The key trick it uses is to fire wi

Three months of OpenClaw

It's wild that the first commit to OpenClaw was on November 25th 2025, and less than three months later it's hit 10,000 commits from 600 contributors, attracted 196,000 GitHub stars and sort-of been featured in an extremely vague Super Bowl commercial for AI.com. Quoting AI.com founder Kris Marszale

Quoting Eric Meyer

I saw yet another “CSS is a massively bloated mess” whine and I’m like. My dude. My brother in Chromium. It is trying as hard as it can to express the totality of visual presentation and layout design and typography and animation and digital interactivity and a few other things in a human-readabl

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt

How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt This piece by Margaret-Anne Storey is the best explanation of the term cognitive debt I've seen so far. Cognitive debt, a term gaining traction recently, instead communicates the notion that the debt compounded from g

Launching Interop 2026

Launching Interop 2026 Jake Archibald reports on Interop 2026, the initiative between Apple, Google, Igalia, Microsoft, and Mozilla to collaborate on ensuring a targeted set of web platform features reach cross-browser parity over the course of the year. I hadn't realized how influential and success

Quoting Boris Cherny

Someone has to prompt the Claudes, talk to customers, coordinate with other teams, decide what to build next. Engineering is changing and great engineers are more important than ever. — Boris Cherny, Claude Code creator, on why Anthropic are still hiring developers Tags: careers, ai, generative

chartroom

CLI tool for creating charts

Quoting Thoughtworks

The retreat challenged the narrative that AI eliminates the need for junior developers. Juniors are more profitable than they have ever been. AI tools get them past the awkward initial net-negative phase faster. They serve as a call option on future productivity. And they are better at AI tools than

Anthropic's public benefit mission

Someone asked if there was an Anthropic equivalent to OpenAI's IRS mission statements over time. Anthropic are a "public benefit corporation" but not a non-profit, so they don't have the …

Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark

OpenAI announced a partnership with Cerebras on January 14th. Four weeks later they're already launching the first integration, "an ultra-fast model for real-time coding in Codex". Despite being named GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark …

A quote from Anthropic

Claude Code was made available to the general public in May 2025. Today, Claude Code’s run-rate revenue has grown to over $2.5 billion; this figure has more than doubled since …

Covering electricity price increases from our data centers

One of the sub-threads of the AI energy usage discourse has been the impact new data centers have on the cost of electricity to nearby residents. Here's detailed analysis from …

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

Scott Shambaugh helps maintain the excellent and venerable matplotlib Python charting library, including taking on the thankless task of triaging and reviewing incoming pull requests. A GitHub account called @crabby-rathbun …

Supervisor, not overseer

In my post about my Showboat project I used the term "overseer" to refer to the person who manages a coding agent. It turns out that's a term tied to …

A quote from Andrew Deck for Niemen Lab

An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media …

Skills in OpenAI API

OpenAI's adoption of Skills continues to gain ground. You can now use Skills directly in the OpenAI API with their shell tool. You can zip skills up and upload them …

rodney

CLI tool for interacting with the web

Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems

New paper by Damon McMillan exploring challenging LLM context tasks involving large SQL schemas (up to 10,000 tables) across different models and file formats: Using SQL generation as a proxy …

AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It

Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business report initial findings in the HBR from their April to December 2025 study of 200 employees at a …

sqlite-history-json

SQLite table history tracking using a JSON audit log

A quote from Thomas Ptacek

People on the orange site are laughing at this, assuming it's just an ad and that there's nothing to it. Vulnerability researchers I talk to do not think this is …

Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode

New "research preview" from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version of their frontier model Claude Opus 4.6 by typing /fast in Claude Code... but at a cost …

Vouch

Mitchell Hashimoto's new system to help address the deluge of worthless AI-generated PRs faced by open source projects now that the friction involved in contributing has dropped so low. He …

A quote from David Crawshaw

I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish …

showboat-demos

Demos of simonw/showcase

showboat

Create executable documents that demonstrate an agent's work

An Update on Heroku

An ominous headline to see on the official Heroku blog and yes, it's bad news. Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and …

A quote from Karel D'Oosterlinck

When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant …

A quote from Tom Dale

I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis. [...] Many people assuming …

cia-world-factbook-2020

Recovered cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/download/factbook-2020.zip from Internet Archive

Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey

Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked: Reproduce your own …

datasette-scan

Datasette plugin for scanning for SQLite files

go-to-wheel

Wrap Go binaries in Python wheels

sqlite-scanner

Scan folders for SQLite database files

A quote from Brandon Sanderson

This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become …

Introducing Deno Sandbox

Here's a new hosted sandbox product from the Deno team. It's actually unrelated to Deno itself - this is part of their Deno Deploy SaaS platform. As such, you don't …

January sponsors-only newsletter is out

I just sent the January edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In the …

Running OpenClaw in Docker

I'm not brave enough to run OpenClaw (aka Clawdbot aka Moltbot) directly on my Mac, so I decided to try running it in a Docker instead container.

A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed.

I talked to Cade Metz for this New York Times piece on OpenClaw and Moltbook. Cade reached out after seeing my blog post about that from the other day. In …

TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker

I've been running OpenClaw using Docker on my Mac. Here are the first in my ongoing notes on how I set that up and the commands I'm using to administer …

A quote from Andrej Karpathy

Originally in 2019, GPT-2 was trained by OpenAI on 32 TPU v3 chips for 168 hours (7 days), with $8/hour/TPUv3 back then, for a total cost of approx. $43K. It …

Singing the gospel of collective efficacy

Lovely piece from Matt Webb about how you can "just do things" to help make your community better for everyone: Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), …

tiny-haversine

A Python package with a C module for haversine() - as a WASM experiment

sqlite-ast

Python library for parsing SQLite SELECT queries into an AST

sqlite-ast-conformance

A language independent conformance suite for implementations of a SQLite SELECT query parser

We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts

Chris Ashworth is the creator and CEO of QLab, a macOS software package for “cue-based, multimedia playback” which is designed to automate lighting and audio for live theater productions. I …

A quote from Steve Yegge

Getting agents using Beads requires much less prompting, because Beads now has 4 months of “Desire Paths” design, which I’ve talked about before. Beads has evolved a very complex command-line …

Datasette 1.0a24

New Datasette alpha this morning. Key new features: Datasette's Request object can now handle multipart/form-data file uploads via the new await request.form(files=True) method. I plan to use this for a …

The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory

Dan Shapiro proposes a five level model of AI-assisted programming, inspired by the five (or rather six, it's zero-indexed) levels of driving automation. Spicy autocomplete, aka original GitHub Copilot or …

Tips for getting coding agents to write good Python tests

Someone asked on Hacker News if I had any tips for getting coding agents to write decent quality tests. Here's what I said: I work in Python which helps a …

Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by thousands of parallel agents

Last week Cursor published Scaling long-running autonomous coding, an article describing their research efforts into coordinating large numbers of autonomous coding agents. One of the projects mentioned in the article was FastRender, a web browser they built from scratch using their agent swarms. I

Cloudflare response header transform rules

I serve Python files from my tools.simonwillison.net subdomain, which is a GitHub Pages site that's served via Cloudflare. For example:

A quote from Jasmine Sun

If you tell a friend they can now instantly create any app, they’ll probably say “Cool! Now I need to think of an idea.” Then they will forget about it, …

Quoting Theia Vogel

[...] i was too busy with work to read anything, so i asked chatgpt to summarize some books on state formation, and it suggested circumscription theory. there was already the natural boundary of my computer hemming the towns in, and town mayors played the role of big men to drive conflict. so i just

Previewing Claude Code for web branches with GitHub Pages

I'm a big user of Claude Code on the web , Anthropic's poorly named cloud-based version of Claude Code which can be driven via the web or their native mobile and desktop applications.

Quoting Chris Lloyd

Most people's mental model of Claude Code is that "it's just a TUI" but it should really be closer to "a small game engine". For each frame our pipeline constructs a scene graph with React then: -> layout elements -> rasterize them to a 2d screen -> diff that against the previous screen -> finally u

multipart-form-data-conformance

A conformance suite for HTTP multipart form data

SSH has no Host header

exe.dev is a new hosting service that, for $20/month, gives you up to 25 VMs "that share 2 CPUs and 8GB RAM". Everything happens over SSH, including creating new VMs. …

Claude’s new constitution

Late last year Richard Weiss found something interesting while poking around with the just-released Claude Opus 4.5: he was able to talk the model into regurgitating a document which was …

Electricity use of AI coding agents

Previous work estimating the energy and water cost of LLMs has generally focused on the cost per prompt using a consumer-level system such as ChatGPT. Simon P. Couch notes that …

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

Detailed and thoughtful description of an open-book and open-chatbot exam run by Ploum at École Polytechnique de Louvain for an "Open Source Strategies" class. Students were told they could use …

jordanhubbard/nanolang

Plenty of people have mused about what a new programming language specifically designed to be used by LLMs might look like. Jordan Hubbard (co-founder of FreeBSD, with serious stints at …

Quoting Jeremy Daer

[On agents using CLI tools in place of REST APIs] To save on context window, yes, but moreso to improve accuracy and success rate when multiple tool calls are involved, particularly when calls must be correctly chained e.g. for pagination, rate-limit backoff, and recognizing authentication failures.

FLUX.2-klein-4B Pure C Implementation

On 15th January Black Forest Labs, a lab formed by the creators of the original Stable Diffusion, released black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B - an Apache 2.0 licensed 4 billion parameter version of their …

Quoting Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen and Manas Joglekar

When we optimize responses using a reward model as a proxy for “goodness” in reinforcement learning, models sometimes learn to “hack” this proxy and output an answer that only “looks good” to it (because coming up with an answer that is actually good can be hard). The philosophy behind confessions i

Open Responses

This is the standardization effort I've most wanted in the world of LLMs: a vendor-neutral specification for the JSON API that clients can use to talk to hosted LLMs. Open …

The Design & Implementation of Sprites

I wrote about Sprites last week. Here's Thomas Ptacek from Fly with the insider details on how they work under the hood. I like this framing of them as "disposable …

Claude Cowork Exfiltrates Files

Claude Cowork defaults to allowing outbound HTTP traffic to only a specific list of domains, to help protect the user against prompt injection attacks that exfiltrate their data. Prompt Armor …

First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent

New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a "research preview" that they describe as "Claude Code for the rest of your work". It's currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application. Update 16th January 2026: it's now a

Anthropic invests $1.5 million in the Python Software Foundation and open source security

This is outstanding news, especially given our decision to withdraw from that NSF grant application back in October. We are thrilled to announce that Anthropic has entered into a two-year …