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  Just published this post about how we’re going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/3/default-hard-budget-caps/

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  I feel this shouldn't have to be said, but if you're running an @OpenClaw bot please don't let it spam GitHub projects with PRs and then write aggressive blog posts attacking the reputation of the maintainers who close those PRs https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/12/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

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  Big new release of my LLM CLI tool and Python library for talking to hundreds of different LLMs - reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses support, server-side tools, smarter logging and a whole lot more https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/4/new-release-of-llm/

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  The new Qwen 3.8 27B, running as a 17GB GGUF in LM Studio on my M5 Max MacBook Pro, just drew me the best pelican riding a bicycle I've seen from any model that runs on my laptop It did take nearly 21 minutes to generate, and used 22,276 reasoning tokens to produce 3,223 tokens of output. Here's the full transcript: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgist.github.com%2Fsimonw%2Ffc909bea4fecf752c7bf9bad0e9dbf2a

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  Here’s my review of Qwen 3.8 27B - I can't remember the last time I've had this much fun playing with a local model that runs on my own computers https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/qwen-38-27b/

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  Hugging Face just published a highly detailed technical account of OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on their systems - it's wild how sophisticated this was: https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline Wrote up some of my own notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/28/anatomy-of-a-frontier-lab-agent-intrusion/

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  Ruff 0.16.0 - Astral's fast Python linter - came out a few days ago and increased the number of default-enabled rules from 59 to 413, which highlighted all sorts of problems across my projects (1618 in sqlite-utils alone) https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/25/ruff/

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  I may have finally found the Python-in-a-sandbox solution I've been looking for... here's my latest experiment, this time running MicroPython in WebAssembly inside my Python applications https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/6/micropython-in-a-sandbox/

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  Wrote up my initial impressions of Claude Fable 5 - it has a big model smell: slow, expensive and capable of crunching through pretty much everything I threw at it https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/9/claude-fable-5/

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  New Datasette release: 1.0a33, which finally brings documents the ?_extra= JSON API mechanism and brings it to the row and query pages in addition to the table pages (Most of the code in this release was built with the help of Claude Fable 5) https://datasette.io/blog/2026/api-extras/

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  After two days with Claude Fable 5 the best way I can describe it is "relentlessly proactive" - here's an example where I dropped in a screenshot of a bug and it span up custom CORS Python servers and used pyobjc-framework-Quartz to capture screenshots https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/11/fable-is-relentlessly-proactive/

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  It's now possible to compile Python extensions (C, C++, Rust etc) to WebAssembly and distribute them through PyPI such that Pyodide can install them directly https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/13/publishing-wasm-wheels/

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  I just released the first release candidate for sqlite-utils v4, adding a migrations system (previously released independently as sqlite-migrate) and support for nested transactions: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/21/sqlite-utils-40rc1/

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  My parallel agent side-project today was having Claude Code port the new Moebius image pinpointing model to ONNX in order to run it entirely in the browser https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/22/porting-moebius/

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  I've added video support to my "shot-scraper" browser automation tool - you (or your coding agent) can now create a storyboard YAML file and use that to record a video demo of new web application features https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/30/shot-scraper-video/

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  Notes on GPT-5.6, which includes some interesting new additions to the API (programmatic tool calling and multi-agent in particular) - plus 18 pelicans for the 6 reasoning levels and 3 new models: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/9/gpt-5-6/

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  New TIL: Using uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly way I finally found a recipe that I like for running `uvx tool-name` in GitHub Actions without downloading a fresh copy of the package every time https://til.simonwillison.net/github-actions/uvx-github-actions-cache

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  I wrote about the completely wild incident where OpenAI were testing a new model and it broke out of its sandbox and broke INTO Hugging Face to steal the answers to the benchmark https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/openai-cyberattack/

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  My notes on Kimi K3, plus some thoughts on what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark even while it becomes further detached from how good the models are at the things that matter (like agentic tool calling across longer conversations) https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/kimi-k3/

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  I released sqlite-utils 4.0, the 124th release but the first major version bump since 3.0 back in 2020 I managed to keep things backwards-compatible all the way up to version 3.39 before the accumulated design mistakes forced me to bump that number! https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/7/sqlite-utils-4/

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  Uber reportedly now caps coding agents at $1,500/month per employee per tool - seems sensible to me, but it's also an interesting hint at the value Uber thinks these tools are providing https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/3/uber-caps-usage/

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  Just launched Datasette Apps - a plugin for Datasette that lets you host full HTML+JS apps in an iframe sandbox that can query your database and do interesting things with your data https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/18/datasette-apps/

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  Fantastic Bing prompt from Ethan Mollick: “I am on a really nice White Star cruise from Southampton, and it is 14th April 1912. What should I do tonight?”—Bing takes this very seriously and tries to help out! Works for all sorts of other historic events as well. https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1629653225472131076

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  GPT-5.5 is out but not yet in the OpenAI API - but in the ongoing battle with Anthropic over OpenClaw OpenAI made their Codex tool's private backend API a semi-approved mechanism... and that one has GPT-5.5... So I used it to draw some pelicans https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/gpt-5-5/

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  I vibe coded a web UI to LiteParse by LlamaIndex, a neat open source library for extracting text from annoying layouts PDFs https://simonw.github.io/liteparse/ More about how I built it on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/liteparse-for-the-web/

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  This week's edition of my email newsletter features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide https://simonw.substack.com/p/gpt-55-chatgpt-images-20-qwen36-27b

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  DeepSeek V4 just dropped - two models, Flash and Pro, both benchmarking well, decent pelicans and prices that put them both as the cheapest in their respective categories by a solid margin https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/24/deepseek-v4/

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  Today OpenAI announced that "Revenue share payments from OpenAI to Microsoft continue through 2030, independent of OpenAI’s technology progress" That "independent of OpenAI’s technology progress" fragment appears to mean that the weird AGI clause is now deceased https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/now-deceased-agi-clause/

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  Microsoft's MIT licensed VibeVoice speech-to-text model (think Whisper with speaker diarization) is really good - my notes on running the 5.71GB 4bit MLX conversion on an M5 MacBook, using about 60GB of RAM at peak and transcribing 1hr of audio in ~9 mins https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/27/vibevoice/

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  I released LLM 0.32a0 this morning, a major backwards-compatible refactor of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for working with language models - the new changes should help LLM work better with reasoning models and other new frontier capabilities https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/29/llm/