Vol. II · No. 156
Established 2025

smallweb

Friday, June 5, 2026
160 writers in the library
Tech · 1 shelves
Tech

Simon Willison.

AI, LLMs, Python, and data tools from the creator of Datasette.

Recent essays

30 of 420

Quoting Andreas Kling

We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...] A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...] Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What ma…

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build great software, often in the same teams: The enthusiasts ar…

Quoting Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop." — Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media,…

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predict…

Microsoft's new MAI models

Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 1T parameters, 35B active, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (137B Parameters, 5B active, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high per…

datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0

Release: datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0 I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out of the sandbox! Tags: python, sandboxing, datasette, webasse…

micropython-wasm 0.1a1

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a1 Fixes for some limitations that emerged while I was trying to use this to build datasette-agent-micropython. Tags: python, sandboxing, webassembly

California Brown Pelican

California Brown Pelican, in Fort Mason, CA, USI'm at the Microsoft Build conference today, held at Fort Mason in San Francisco. There are California Brown Pelicans diving into the water directly behind venue! Tags: microsoft, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm-rele…

Pasted File Editor

Tool: Pasted File Editor I really like how you can paste a large volume of text into claude.ai (or the Claude desktop/mobile apps) and it will detect it as a large paste and turn it into a file attachment instead. I decided to have Codex desktop build me a ver…

micropython-wasm 0.1a0

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a0 My latest sandboxing experiment: This alpha package bundles a lightly customized WASM build of MicroPython with a wrapper to execute code in it via wasmtime. Tags: python, sandboxing, webassembly

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked

Hackers Simply Asked Meta AI to Give Them Access to High-Profile Instagram Accounts. It Worked I had trouble believing this story was true, but I've seen it verified from multiple sources now: One video shows a hacker starting a conversation with Meta’s AI sup…

May 2026 newsletter

I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month The model releases were a little disapp…

datasette 1.0a32

Release: datasette 1.0a32 A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was experimenting with Service Workers yesterday. Tags: datasette, an…

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription I find this post by David Wilson very relatable. David lists 16+ projects he's spun up with AI tooling, and concludes: I didn't mean to build most of these things. Usually the Claude session started with some…

Quoting Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews

Anthropic defines “run-rate revenue” in two parts. Use the last 28 days of sales ⁠from customers charged on a consumption basis and multiply it by 13. Then, multiply the monthly subscription take by 12, ​and add the two together. — Karen Kwok for Reuters Break…

How we contain Claude across products

How we contain Claude across products A complaint I often have about sandboxing products is that they are rarely thoroughly documented, and in the absence of detailed documentation it's hard to know how much I can trust them. Anthropic just published a fantast…

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter I'm retiring from…

Quoting Daniel Jalkut

My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it. — Daniel Jalkut, via John Gruber Tags: ai, john-gruber

Running Python ASGI apps in the browser via Pyodide + a service worker

Research: Running Python ASGI apps in the browser via Pyodide + a service worker Datasette Lite is my version of Datasette that runs entirely in the browser using Pyodide in WebAssembly. When I first built it four years ago I used Web Workers and code that int…

datasette 1.0a31

Release: datasette 1.0a31 Another significant alpha release, with two new headline features. Datasette now offers users with the necessary permissions the ability to both execute write queries against their database and to save stored queries (renamed from "ca…

Anthropic's run-rate revenue hits $47 billion

The most interesting thing about Anthropic's $65B Series H announcement is this line (emphasis mine): Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this m…

Claude Opus 4.8: "a modest but tangible improvement"

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. My favourite thing about it is this note in the release announcement: Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor. There’s still more to be done: we’re working on developing and r…

llm-anthropic 0.25.1

Release: llm-anthropic 0.25.1 New model: Claude Opus 4.8 (claude-opus-4.8). New -o fast 1 option for fast mode, for organizations with that feature enabled on their account. Default max_tokens for each model now defaults to that model's maximum output rather t…

markdown-svg-renderer

Tool: markdown-svg-renderer A slightly customized Markdown rendering tool with special treatment for fenced code SVG blocks - it both renders the image and provides a tab for switching to the code view. You can paste in Markdown or give it a URL to a CORS-enab…

sqlite AGENTS.md

sqlite AGENTS.md SQLite gained an AGENTS.md file five days ago - but it's not intended for their own development, it's presumably aimed at people who are pointing agents at the SQLite codebase. It includes: SQLite does not accept pull requests without prior ag…

I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staff. I think this is because OpenAI and Anthropic have both fo…

Quoting Kyle Ferrana

PICARD: Data, shields up DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy. [camera shakes] WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shiel…

The pressure

The pressure Daniel Stenberg on the unprecedented level of pressure the curl team are facing right now thanks to the deluge of (credible) AI-assisted security issues being reported. The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024…

Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files

Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files The biggest challenge in designing agentic systems continues to be preventing them from enabling attackers to exfiltrate data. In this case Microsoft Copilot Cowork (yes, that's a real product name) was allowing agent…

Quoting Paul Graham

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it. I have never…