Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net
Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/
Terrifying.
Right now Rikers Island, the physically largest jail in the entire United States, is holding under 7,000 people.
ICE's warehouse plans include detention camps which will hold between 8,500-10,000 people in buildings not designed for human habitation.
ICE's warehouse plans include detention camps which will hold between 8,500-10,000 people in buildings not designed for human habitation.
February 9, 2026 at 7:07 PM
Terrifying.
Interesting research in HBR today about how the productivity boost you can get from AI tools can lead to burnout or general metal exhaustion, something I've noticed in my own work simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/a...
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 …
simonwillison.net
February 9, 2026 at 4:44 PM
Interesting research in HBR today about how the productivity boost you can get from AI tools can lead to burnout or general metal exhaustion, something I've noticed in my own work simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/a...
In celebration of the 2026 breeding season ceramic artist Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/8/k...
February 8, 2026 at 5:26 PM
In celebration of the 2026 breeding season ceramic artist Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/8/k...
I wrote about the most ambitious form of AI-assisted software development I've seen yet - Strong DM's "Software Factory" approach, where two of the guiding principles are "Code must not be written by humans" and "Code must not be reviewed by humans" simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/s...
How StrongDM’s AI team build serious software without even looking at the code
Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks …
simonwillison.net
February 7, 2026 at 3:42 PM
I wrote about the most ambitious form of AI-assisted software development I've seen yet - Strong DM's "Software Factory" approach, where two of the guiding principles are "Code must not be written by humans" and "Code must not be reviewed by humans" simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/s...
Pelicans for Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 - I don't have much interesting to say about these models yet to be honest, they're both incremental improvements on their predecessors and very capable simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3
Two major new model releases today, within about 15 minutes of each other. Anthropic released Opus 4.6. Here's its pelican: OpenAI release GPT-5.3-Codex, albeit only via their Codex app, not …
simonwillison.net
February 5, 2026 at 8:30 PM
Pelicans for Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 - I don't have much interesting to say about these models yet to be honest, they're both incremental improvements on their predecessors and very capable simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Somewhat devastating news today from the CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they …
simonwillison.net
February 5, 2026 at 12:25 AM
The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...
Two new speech-to-text models (similar to Whisper) from Mistral today - one of them is API-only, the other is a 8.9GB Apache-2.0 licensed open weights model for "realtime" transcription. They're both very good! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/v...
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound
Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, …
simonwillison.net
February 4, 2026 at 10:43 PM
Two new speech-to-text models (similar to Whisper) from Mistral today - one of them is API-only, the other is a 8.9GB Apache-2.0 licensed open weights model for "realtime" transcription. They're both very good! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/v...
I've been experimenting with distributing Go binaries as wheels on PyPI so you can execute them without installing them first using commands like "uvx sqlite-scanner ~/Downloads" - I wrote sqlite-scanner in Go
I built go-to-wheel to help implement this pattern simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/d...
I built go-to-wheel to help implement this pattern simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/d...
Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel
I’ve been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I’m enjoying how there’s generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring …
simonwillison.net
February 4, 2026 at 3:03 PM
I've been experimenting with distributing Go binaries as wheels on PyPI so you can execute them without installing them first using commands like "uvx sqlite-scanner ~/Downloads" - I wrote sqlite-scanner in Go
I built go-to-wheel to help implement this pattern simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/d...
I built go-to-wheel to help implement this pattern simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/d...
A few notes on OpenAI's new Codex macOS Electron app - I've had a few days of preview access. I had fun poking around in the SQLite database it uses for scheduled Automations! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/2/i...
Introducing the Codex app
OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I've had a few days of preview access - it's a solid app that provides a nice UI …
simonwillison.net
February 2, 2026 at 7:57 PM
A few notes on OpenAI's new Codex macOS Electron app - I've had a few days of preview access. I had fun poking around in the SQLite database it uses for scheduled Automations! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/2/i...
My laptop got its photo in the NYT!
(There's a photo of me later on in the story too) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/t...
(There's a photo of me later on in the story too) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/t...
A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed.
www.nytimes.com
February 2, 2026 at 3:52 PM
My laptop got its photo in the NYT!
(There's a photo of me later on in the story too) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/t...
(There's a photo of me later on in the story too) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/t...
New TIL: running OpenClaw in Docker on my Mac - this is an officially documented path but there were still a few things that caught me out, hence my TIL til.simonwillison.net/llms/opencla...
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.
til.simonwillison.net
February 2, 2026 at 12:19 AM
New TIL: running OpenClaw in Docker on my Mac - this is an officially documented path but there were still a few things that caught me out, hence my TIL til.simonwillison.net/llms/opencla...
@genmon.fyi my current favorite "you can just do things" is a bit of a stretch, but apparently you can just build a successful software company for 20 years then use the proceeds to start a theater in Baltimore (for "research") and give the space away to artists for free bmoreart.com/2024/09/the-...
The Voxel is a Cutting-Edge Theater Experiment - BmoreArt
bmoreart.com
January 31, 2026 at 12:50 AM
@genmon.fyi my current favorite "you can just do things" is a bit of a stretch, but apparently you can just build a successful software company for 20 years then use the proceeds to start a theater in Baltimore (for "research") and give the space away to artists for free bmoreart.com/2024/09/the-...
I wrote about Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw and Moltbook, the fascinating, weird and sometimes even useful social network for digital assistants to swap tips and gossip with each other simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...
Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now
The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It’s an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger …
simonwillison.net
January 30, 2026 at 4:45 PM
I wrote about Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw and Moltbook, the fascinating, weird and sometimes even useful social network for digital assistants to swap tips and gossip with each other simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...
I appreciated Chris Ashworth's TikTok thoughts on Claude Code. As someone who works in the arts he's a a natural generative AI skeptic - he builds QLab, the theater sound/lighting automation software www.tiktok.com/@chris_ashwo...
More of my notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...
More of my notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...
we gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts #theater #arts #techtheatre #llm
TikTok video by chris
www.tiktok.com
January 30, 2026 at 3:58 AM
I appreciated Chris Ashworth's TikTok thoughts on Claude Code. As someone who works in the arts he's a a natural generative AI skeptic - he builds QLab, the theater sound/lighting automation software www.tiktok.com/@chris_ashwo...
More of my notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...
More of my notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...
I wrote about a localStorage trick I've been using to add dynamic per-user features to my blog despite it being served behind a 15 minute Cloudflare cache meaning everyone gets the exact same HTML simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/28/...
Adding dynamic features to an aggressively cached website
My blog uses aggressive caching: it sits behind Cloudflare with a 15 minute cache header, which guarantees it can survive even the largest traffic spike to any given page. I’ve …
simonwillison.net
January 28, 2026 at 10:13 PM
I wrote about a localStorage trick I've been using to add dynamic per-user features to my blog despite it being served behind a 15 minute Cloudflare cache meaning everyone gets the exact same HTML simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/28/...
The latest entrant in the coding-agent-constructed web browsers is here, this one by @emsh.cat, and it's REALLY impressive - 3 days of development, 20,000 lines of Rust, no Cargo dependencies and it renders HTML+CSS extremely well
simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...
simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...
One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch
embedding-shapes was so infuriated by the hype around Cursor's FastRender browser project - thousands of parallel agents producing ~1.6 million lines of Rust - that they were inspired to take …
simonwillison.net
January 27, 2026 at 5:00 PM
The latest entrant in the coding-agent-constructed web browsers is here, this one by @emsh.cat, and it's REALLY impressive - 3 days of development, 20,000 lines of Rust, no Cargo dependencies and it renders HTML+CSS extremely well
simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...
simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...
Notes and a pelican for the new Kimi K2.5 - a multi-modal (image input) model from Moonshot AI which also claims a "self-directed agent swarm paradigm" simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...
Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence
Kimi K2 landed in July as a 1 trillion parameter open weight LLM. It was joined by Kimi K2 Thinking in November which added reasoning capabilities. Now they've made it …
simonwillison.net
January 27, 2026 at 3:15 PM
Notes and a pelican for the new Kimi K2.5 - a multi-modal (image input) model from Moonshot AI which also claims a "self-directed agent swarm paradigm" simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...
OpenAI shipped a huge upgrade to ChatGPT Code Interpreter and failed to document it anywhere, even in the release notes - but ChatGPT can now pip/npm install packages and run code in Python, Node.js, Bash, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++! simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/26/...
ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files
One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was …
simonwillison.net
January 26, 2026 at 7:22 PM
OpenAI shipped a huge upgrade to ChatGPT Code Interpreter and failed to document it anywhere, even in the release notes - but ChatGPT can now pip/npm install packages and run code in Python, Node.js, Bash, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++! simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/26/...
Reposted by Simon Willison
Who would like to look at some fluffy chicken butts?
January 25, 2026 at 4:27 AM
Who would like to look at some fluffy chicken butts?
I had a fascinating conversation with Wilson Lin about FastRender, the browser rendering engine he built with the help of 2,000+ coding agents over the past few weeks. It's 47m on YouTube or you can read my highlights here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/...
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 mention...
simonwillison.net
January 23, 2026 at 9:35 PM
I had a fascinating conversation with Wilson Lin about FastRender, the browser rendering engine he built with the help of 2,000+ coding agents over the past few weeks. It's 47m on YouTube or you can read my highlights here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/...
Qwen released a new Apache 2.0 licensed text-to-speech model, with full voice cloning abilities, and it's really effective - my notes from trying it out here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/...
Qwen3-TTS Family is Now Open Sourced: Voice Design, Clone, and Generation
I haven't been paying much attention to the state-of-the-art in speech generation models other than noting that they've got really good, so I can't speak for how notable this new …
simonwillison.net
January 22, 2026 at 5:51 PM
Qwen released a new Apache 2.0 licensed text-to-speech model, with full voice cloning abilities, and it's really effective - my notes from trying it out here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/...
TIL on how I use Claude Code on my iPhone with GitHub Pages to preview Claude's changes while it's still working on them til.simonwillison.net/claude-code/...
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.
til.simonwillison.net
January 22, 2026 at 5:50 PM
TIL on how I use Claude Code on my iPhone with GitHub Pages to preview Claude's changes while it's still working on them til.simonwillison.net/claude-code/...
A few quick notes on the Claude "soul document" that was released by Anthropic today under a CC0 public domain license - it's a huge 35,000 token essay used as part of Claude's training to instill core values and help define Claude's personality simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/21/...
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 …
simonwillison.net
January 21, 2026 at 11:41 PM
A few quick notes on the Claude "soul document" that was released by Anthropic today under a CC0 public domain license - it's a huge 35,000 token essay used as part of Claude's training to instill core values and help define Claude's personality simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/21/...
This is great - it's about time someone updated the discourse on LLM energy usage to reflect that coding agents use massively more prompts than occasional questions to ChatGPT
Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher
Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher
Whenever I read discourse on AI energy/water use that focuses on the "median query," I can't help but feel misled. Coding agents like Claude Code send hundreds of longer-than-median queries every session, and I run dozens of sessions a day.
On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...
On my blog: www.simonpcouch.com/blog/2026-01...
January 20, 2026 at 11:10 PM
This is great - it's about time someone updated the discourse on LLM energy usage to reflect that coding agents use massively more prompts than occasional questions to ChatGPT
Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher
Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher
Having compiled and run the web browser that Cursor built in a couple of weeks using mostly a giant fleet of coding agents I'm actually very impressed by it - there are rendering glitches but the renders it produces are surprisingly usable for a few-week-old project simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/...
Scaling long-running autonomous coding
Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from …
simonwillison.net
January 19, 2026 at 5:24 AM
Having compiled and run the web browser that Cursor built in a couple of weeks using mostly a giant fleet of coding agents I'm actually very impressed by it - there are rendering glitches but the renders it produces are surprisingly usable for a few-week-old project simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/...