Simon Willison
@simon.fedi.simonwillison.net.ap.brid.gy
Open source developer building tools to help journalists, archivists, librarians and others analyze, explore and publish their data. https://datasette.io […]
[bridged from https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
[bridged from https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
Some notes on GPT-5.1, which is now available in the OpenAI API
The new reasoning options are interesting, but the pelican feels like a bit of a regression from GPT-5 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/gpt-51/
The new reasoning options are interesting, but the pelican feels like a bit of a regression from GPT-5 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/gpt-51/
Introducing GPT-5.1 for developers
OpenAI announced GPT-5.1 yesterday, calling it a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT. Today they've added it to their API. We actually got four new models today: gpt-5.1 gpt-5.1-chat-latest gpt-5.1-codex gpt-5.1-codex-mini There …
simonwillison.net
November 14, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Some notes on GPT-5.1, which is now available in the OpenAI API
The new reasoning options are interesting, but the pelican feels like a bit of a regression from GPT-5 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/gpt-51/
The new reasoning options are interesting, but the pelican feels like a bit of a regression from GPT-5 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/gpt-51/
Since this question shows up so often that it qualifies as an FAQ, here's my definite answer to "What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles?" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-riding-bicycles/
What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles?
Almost every time I share a new example of an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle a variant of this question pops up: how do you know the labs …
simonwillison.net
November 13, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Since this question shows up so often that it qualifies as an FAQ, here's my definite answer to "What happens if AI labs train for pelicans riding bicycles?" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/training-for-pelicans-riding-bicycles/
I've now reached the "six coding agents in six terminal windows at once" phase of parallel agent delirium
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/11/six-coding-agents-at-once/
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/11/six-coding-agents-at-once/
November 11, 2025 at 11:03 PM
I've now reached the "six coding agents in six terminal windows at once" phase of parallel agent delirium
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/11/six-coding-agents-at-once/
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/11/six-coding-agents-at-once/
Sent out my weekly-ish newsletter - I left it a bit too long this time and it ended up with three full articles, two YouTube videos, 5 SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles and 3 POV-Ray renders of pelicans riding bicycles https://simonw.substack.com/p/code-research-projects-with-async
Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex
Plus reverse engineering Codex CLI to get GPT-5-Codex-Mini to draw me a pelican
simonw.substack.com
November 11, 2025 at 4:38 PM
Sent out my weekly-ish newsletter - I left it a bit too long this time and it ended up with three full articles, two YouTube videos, 5 SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles and 3 POV-Ray renders of pelicans riding bicycles https://simonw.substack.com/p/code-research-projects-with-async
This is really fun - @beetle_b ran a variant of my pelican riding a bicycle SVG test using POV-Ray instead and got terrible ray-traced pelicans out of a bunch of different models: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/ and […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
November 9, 2025 at 5:15 PM
This is really fun - @beetle_b ran a variant of my pelican riding a bicycle SVG test using POV-Ray instead and got terrible ray-traced pelicans out of a bunch of different models: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Oct/pelican-on-a-bike-raytracer-edition/ and […]
OpenAI partially released a new model yesterday called GPT-5-Codex-Mini
No API access yet, but I did some truly horrible things to their Codex CLI app to get it to spit out this SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
No API access yet, but I did some truly horrible things to their Codex CLI app to get it to spit out this SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
November 9, 2025 at 3:38 AM
OpenAI partially released a new model yesterday called GPT-5-Codex-Mini
No API access yet, but I did some truly horrible things to their Codex CLI app to get it to spit out this SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
No API access yet, but I did some truly horrible things to their Codex CLI app to get it to spit out this SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
I have a hunch that current LLMs might make it easier to launch a brand new programming language, provided you can describe it in a few thousand tokens and ship it with a compiler and linter that coding agents can use […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
November 7, 2025 at 4:14 PM
I have a hunch that current LLMs might make it easier to launch a brand new programming language, provided you can describe it in a few thousand tokens and ship it with a compiler and linter that coding agents can use […]
New TIL: Using Codex CLI with gpt-oss:120b on an NVIDIA DGX Spark via Tailscale https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/codex-spark-gpt-oss
Using Codex CLI with gpt-oss:120b on an NVIDIA DGX Spark via Tailscale
I've written about the DGX Spark before. Here's how I got OpenAI's Codex CLI to run on my Mac against a gpt-oss:120b model running on the DGX Spark via a Tailscale network.
til.simonwillison.net
November 7, 2025 at 7:24 AM
New TIL: Using Codex CLI with gpt-oss:120b on an NVIDIA DGX Spark via Tailscale https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/codex-spark-gpt-oss
Notes on Kimi K2 Thinking, the huge new open weights (but not open source, it's under a "modified MIT license") model from Moonshot AI https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/kimi-k2-thinking/
Kimi K2 Thinking
Chinese AI lab Moonshot's Kimi K2 established itself as one of the largest open weight models - 1 trillion parameters - back in July. They've now released the Thinking version, …
simonwillison.net
November 6, 2025 at 11:56 PM
Notes on Kimi K2 Thinking, the huge new open weights (but not open source, it's under a "modified MIT license") model from Moonshot AI https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/kimi-k2-thinking/
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Sarahp/115504173496002298
Glad to see this become a universal feature as opposed to one that was limited to specific clients
Glad to see this become a universal feature as opposed to one that was limited to specific clients
Mastodon’s latest software update brings quote posts to all server operators https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/06/mastodons-latest-software-update-brings-quote-posts-to-all-server-operators/
Mastodon’s latest software update brings quote posts to all server operators
Mastodon's latest software version brings quote posts with added controls to all servers.
techcrunch.com
November 6, 2025 at 6:34 PM
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Sarahp/115504173496002298
Glad to see this become a universal feature as opposed to one that was limited to specific clients
Glad to see this become a universal feature as opposed to one that was limited to specific clients
Made a new video demonstrating my process for upgrading a Datasette plugin using uv and an OpenAI Codex bash one-liner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy4ci7AoF9Y
Here are detailed notes to accompany the video on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/upgrading-datasette-plugins/
Here are detailed notes to accompany the video on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/upgrading-datasette-plugins/
Video + notes on upgrading a Datasette plugin for the latest 1.0 alpha
I’m upgrading various plugins for compatibility with the new Datasette 1.0a20 alpha release and I decided to record a video of the process. This post accompanies that video with detailed …
simonwillison.net
November 6, 2025 at 6:32 PM
Made a new video demonstrating my process for upgrading a Datasette plugin using uv and an OpenAI Codex bash one-liner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy4ci7AoF9Y
Here are detailed notes to accompany the video on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/upgrading-datasette-plugins/
Here are detailed notes to accompany the video on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/upgrading-datasette-plugins/
I've been getting a lot of value using coding agents for code research tasks recently - I have a dedicated simonw/research GitHub repo and I frequently have them run detailed experiments and write up the results. Here's how I'm doing that + some examples […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
November 6, 2025 at 3:58 PM
I've been getting a lot of value using coding agents for code research tasks recently - I have a dedicated simonw/research GitHub repo and I frequently have them run detailed experiments and write up the results. Here's how I'm doing that + some examples […]
Achievement unlocked: caused Hacker News to have a 150+ comment argument about a TikTok joke (while I was asleep) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45820872
I’m worried that they put co-pilot in Excel | Hacker News
news.ycombinator.com
November 5, 2025 at 3:24 PM
Achievement unlocked: caused Hacker News to have a 150+ comment argument about a TikTok joke (while I was asleep) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45820872
Datasette 1.0a20 is out, featuring an entirely new SQL-powered permissions system. This is by far the most ambitious project I've attempted with the help of coding agents (Claude Code and Codex CLI in this case) - here are detailed notes on how it works and what I learned along the way […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
November 4, 2025 at 9:36 PM
Datasette 1.0a20 is out, featuring an entirely new SQL-powered permissions system. This is by far the most ambitious project I've attempted with the help of coding agents (Claude Code and Codex CLI in this case) - here are detailed notes on how it works and what I learned along the way […]
I wrote up some notes on two new papers on prompt injection: Agents Rule of Two (from Meta AI) and The Attacker Moves Second (from Anthropic + OpenAI = DeepMind + others) https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/2/new-prompt-injection-papers/
New prompt injection papers: Agents Rule of Two and The Attacker Moves Second
Two interesting new papers regarding LLM security and prompt injection came to my attention this weekend. Agents Rule of Two: A Practical Approach to AI Agent Security The first is …
simonwillison.net
November 2, 2025 at 11:11 PM
I wrote up some notes on two new papers on prompt injection: Agents Rule of Two (from Meta AI) and The Attacker Moves Second (from Anthropic + OpenAI = DeepMind + others) https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/2/new-prompt-injection-papers/
Just sent out the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter - you can pay me $10/month to send you less!
Here's the table of contents
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/1/sponsors-only-newsletter/
Here's the table of contents
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/1/sponsors-only-newsletter/
November 1, 2025 at 10:15 PM
Just sent out the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter - you can pay me $10/month to send you less!
Here's the table of contents
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/1/sponsors-only-newsletter/
Here's the table of contents
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/1/sponsors-only-newsletter/
My notes on CoreWeave's acquistion of Marimo - this year they also snapped up Weights & Biases, OpenPipe and Mammoth AI https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/31/coreweave-acquires-marimo/
October 31, 2025 at 3:00 PM
My notes on CoreWeave's acquistion of Marimo - this year they also snapped up Weights & Biases, OpenPipe and Mammoth AI https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/31/coreweave-acquires-marimo/
MiniMax M2 is the new "most intelligent" open weights model (according to Artificial Analysis) - the MIT licensed weights are just 230GB and it appears comparable to Sonnet 4, while priced closer to Gemini 2.5 Flash. Notes here, including a new LLM plugin […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
October 29, 2025 at 10:57 PM
MiniMax M2 is the new "most intelligent" open weights model (according to Artificial Analysis) - the MIT licensed weights are just 230GB and it appears comparable to Sonnet 4, while priced closer to Gemini 2.5 Flash. Notes here, including a new LLM plugin […]
Notes on Cursor 2.0 and a pelican drawn by their brand new Composer-1 coding model, which they describe as "4x faster than similarly intelligent models" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/29/cursor-composer/
Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
Cursor released Cursor 2.0 today, with a refreshed UI focused on agentic coding (and running agents in parallel) and a new model that's unique to Cursor called Composer 1. As far …
simonwillison.net
October 29, 2025 at 8:48 PM
Notes on Cursor 2.0 and a pelican drawn by their brand new Composer-1 coding model, which they describe as "4x faster than similarly intelligent models" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/29/cursor-composer/
The GitHub Universe badge this year is a full Raspberry Pi with a color screen and WiFi!
I had a ton of fun hacking around with it yesterday, here are detailed notes on what I've built so far https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/28/github-universe-badge/
I had a ton of fun hacking around with it yesterday, here are detailed notes on what I've built so far https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/28/github-universe-badge/
Hacking the WiFi-enabled color screen GitHub Universe conference badge
I’m at GitHub Universe this week (thanks to a free ticket from Microsoft). Yesterday I picked up my conference badge... which incorporates a full Raspberry Pi with a battery, color …
simonwillison.net
October 28, 2025 at 5:23 PM
The GitHub Universe badge this year is a full Raspberry Pi with a color screen and WiFi!
I had a ton of fun hacking around with it yesterday, here are detailed notes on what I've built so far https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/28/github-universe-badge/
I had a ton of fun hacking around with it yesterday, here are detailed notes on what I've built so far https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/28/github-universe-badge/
This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/psf-withdrawn-proposal/
https://fosstodon.org/@ThePSF/115446659188615376
https://fosstodon.org/@ThePSF/115446659188615376
The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python …
simonwillison.net
October 27, 2025 at 8:36 PM
This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/psf-withdrawn-proposal/
https://fosstodon.org/@ThePSF/115446659188615376
https://fosstodon.org/@ThePSF/115446659188615376
It's neat how if you ask Claude Code questions about itself it can answer them, because it knows how to fetch a Markdown index of its own online documentation and then navigate to the right place
I wish more LLM tools would implement the same pattern! […]
I wish more LLM tools would implement the same pattern! […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
October 24, 2025 at 11:07 PM
It's neat how if you ask Claude Code questions about itself it can answer them, because it knows how to fetch a Markdown index of its own online documentation and then navigate to the right place
I wish more LLM tools would implement the same pattern! […]
I wish more LLM tools would implement the same pattern! […]
Geoffrey Litt just proposed a new analogy for working with AI coding tools that I really like: you are the surgeon, staying in command and doing the most challenging work - the AI tools are your support team and surgical assistants https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/24/geoffrey-litt/
A quote from Geoffrey Litt
A lot of people say AI will make us all "managers" or "editors"...but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon. A …
simonwillison.net
October 24, 2025 at 2:29 PM
Geoffrey Litt just proposed a new analogy for working with AI coding tools that I really like: you are the surgeon, staying in command and doing the most challenging work - the AI tools are your support team and surgical assistants https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/24/geoffrey-litt/
I recorded a ten minute video showing my vibe-coding process for building a tool for sharing formatted terminal sessions via copy and paste using the new Claude Code for web - now available on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQvMLLrFPVI
Here are detailed notes (including the full […]
Here are detailed notes (including the full […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
October 23, 2025 at 4:17 AM
I recorded a ten minute video showing my vibe-coding process for building a tool for sharing formatted terminal sessions via copy and paste using the new Claude Code for web - now available on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQvMLLrFPVI
Here are detailed notes (including the full […]
Here are detailed notes (including the full […]
OpenAI's CISO Dane Stuckey posted an essay (on Twitter) about how their new ChatGPT Atlas browser attempts to deal with the risk of prompt injection attacks, I ended up writing a point-by-point commentary on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/openai-ciso-on-atlas/
Dane Stuckey (OpenAI CISO) on prompt injection risks for ChatGPT Atlas
My biggest complaint about the launch of the ChatGPT Atlas browser the other day was the lack of details on how OpenAI are addressing prompt injection attacks. The launch post …
simonwillison.net
October 22, 2025 at 8:51 PM
OpenAI's CISO Dane Stuckey posted an essay (on Twitter) about how their new ChatGPT Atlas browser attempts to deal with the risk of prompt injection attacks, I ended up writing a point-by-point commentary on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/openai-ciso-on-atlas/