all written video podcast

  • GitHub Repo Size - Simon Willison

    GitHub Repo Size - Simon Willison

    2026-04-09
    Tool: GitHub Repo Size GitHub doesn't tell you the repo size in the UI, but it's available in the CORS-friendly API. Paste a repo into this tool to see the size, for example for simonw/datasette (8.1MB). Tags: cors, github
  • asgi-gzip 0.3 - Simon Willison

    asgi-gzip 0.3 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-09
    Release: asgi-gzip 0.3 I ran into trouble deploying a new feature using SSE to a production Datasette instance, and it turned out that instance was using datasette-gzip which uses asgi-gzip which was incorrectly compressing event/text-stream...
  • Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - Simon Willison

    Meta's new model is Muse Spark, and meta.ai chat has some interesting tools - Simon Willison

    2026-04-08
    Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago. It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently "a private API preview to select users", but you can try it out today on meta.ai...
  • Quoting Giles Turnbull - Simon Willison

    Quoting Giles Turnbull - Simon Willison

    2026-04-08
    I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession. — Giles Turnbull, AI and the human voice Tags: ai-ethics, writing, ai
  • GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks - Simon Willison

    GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks - Simon Willison

    2026-04-07
    GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks Chinese AI lab Z.ai's latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster - the same size as their previous GLM-5 release, and sharing the same paper. It's available via...
  • Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - Simon Willison

    Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me - Simon Willison

    2026-04-07
    Anthropic didn't release their latest model, Claude Mythos (system card PDF), today. They have instead made it available to a very restricted set of preview partners under their newly announced Project Glasswing. The model is a general purpose...
  • SQLite WAL Mode Across Docker Containers Sharing a Volume - Simon Willison

    SQLite WAL Mode Across Docker Containers Sharing a Volume - Simon Willison

    2026-04-07
    Research: SQLite WAL Mode Across Docker Containers Sharing a Volume Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News about whether two SQLite processes in separate Docker containers that share the same volume might run into problems due to WAL shared...
  • Google AI Edge Gallery - Simon Willison

    Google AI Edge Gallery - Simon Willison

    2026-04-06
    Google AI Edge Gallery Terrible name, really great app: this is Google's official app for running their Gemma 4 models (the E2B and E4B sizes, plus some members of the Gemma 3 family) directly on your iPhone. It works really well. The E2B model is...
  • datasette-ports 0.2 - Simon Willison

    datasette-ports 0.2 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-06
    Release: datasette-ports 0.2 No longer requires Datasette - running uvx datasette-ports now works as well. Installing it as a Datasette plugin continues to provide the datasette ports command. Tags: datasette
  • scan-for-secrets 0.3 - Simon Willison

    scan-for-secrets 0.3 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-06
    Release: scan-for-secrets 0.3 New -r/--redact option which shows the list of matches, asks for confirmation and then replaces every match with REDACTED, taking escaping rules into account. New Python function redact_file(file_path: str | Path,...
  • Cleanup Claude Code Paste - Simon Willison

    Cleanup Claude Code Paste - Simon Willison

    2026-04-06
    Tool: Cleanup Claude Code Paste Super-niche tool this. I sometimes copy prompts out of the Claude Code terminal app and they come out with a bunch of weird additional whitespace. This tool cleans that up. Tags: tools, claude-code
  • datasette-ports 0.1 - Simon Willison

    datasette-ports 0.1 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-06
    Release: datasette-ports 0.1 Another example of README-driven development, this time solving a problem that might be unique to me. I often find myself running a bunch of different Datasette instances with different databases and different...
  • Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI - Simon Willison

    Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI - Simon Willison

    2026-04-05
    Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI Lalit Maganti provides one of my favorite pieces of long-form writing on agentic engineering I've seen in ages. They spent eight years thinking about and then three months building...
  • Quoting Chengpeng Mou - Simon Willison

    Quoting Chengpeng Mou - Simon Willison

    2026-04-05
    From anonymized U.S. ChatGPT data, we are seeing: ~2M weekly messages on health insurance ~600K weekly messages [classified as healthcare] from people living in “hospital deserts” (30 min drive to nearest hospital) 7 out of 10 msgs happen outside...
  • Syntaqlite Playground - Simon Willison

    Syntaqlite Playground - Simon Willison

    2026-04-05
    Tool: Syntaqlite Playground Lalit Maganti's syntaqlite is currently being discussed on Hacker News thanks to Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI, a deep dive into how it was built. This inspired me to revisit a research...
  • scan-for-secrets 0.2 - Simon Willison

    scan-for-secrets 0.2 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-05
    Release: scan-for-secrets 0.2 CLI tool now streams results as they are found rather than waiting until the end, which is better for large directories. -d/--directory option can now be used multiple times to scan multiple directories. New -f/--file...
  • scan-for-secrets 0.1.1 - Simon Willison

    scan-for-secrets 0.1.1 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-05
    Release: scan-for-secrets 0.1.1 Added documentation of the escaping schemes that are also scanned. Removed unnecessary repr escaping scheme, which was already covered by json.
  • scan-for-secrets 0.1 - Simon Willison

    scan-for-secrets 0.1 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-05
    Release: scan-for-secrets 0.1 I like publishing transcripts of local Claude Code sessions using my claude-code-transcripts tool but I'm often paranoid that one of my API keys or similar secrets might inadvertently be revealed in the detailed log...
  • research-llm-apis 2026-04-04 - Simon Willison

    research-llm-apis 2026-04-04 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-05
    Release: research-llm-apis 2026-04-04 I'm working on a major change to my LLM Python library and CLI tool. LLM provides an abstraction layer over hundreds of different LLMs from dozens of different vendors thanks to its plugin system, and some of...
  • Quoting Kyle Daigle - Simon Willison

    Quoting Kyle Daigle - Simon Willison

    2026-04-04
    [GitHub] platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.) GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023...
  • Vulnerability Research Is Cooked - Simon Willison

    Vulnerability Research Is Cooked - Simon Willison

    2026-04-03
    Vulnerability Research Is Cooked Thomas Ptacek's take on the sudden and enormous impact the latest frontier models are having on the field of vulnerability research. Within the next few months, coding agents will drastically alter both the...
  • The cognitive impact of coding agents - Simon Willison

    The cognitive impact of coding agents - Simon Willison

    2026-04-03
    A fun thing about recording a podcast with a professional like Lenny Rachitsky is that his team know how to slice the resulting video up into TikTok-sized short form vertical videos. Here's one he shared on Twitter today which ended up attracting...
  • Quoting Willy Tarreau - Simon Willison

    Quoting Willy Tarreau - Simon Willison

    2026-04-03
    On the kernel security list we've seen a huge bump of reports. We were between 2 and 3 per week maybe two years ago, then reached probably 10 a week over the last year with the only difference being only AI slop, and now since the beginning of the...
  • Quoting Daniel Stenberg - Simon Willison

    Quoting Daniel Stenberg - Simon Willison

    2026-04-03
    The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good. I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's...
  • Quoting Greg Kroah-Hartman - Simon Willison

    Quoting Greg Kroah-Hartman - Simon Willison

    2026-04-03
    Months ago, we were getting what we called 'AI slop,' AI-generated security reports that were obviously wrong or low quality. It was kind of funny. It didn't really worry us. Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we...
  • Can JavaScript Escape a CSP Meta Tag Inside an Iframe? - Simon Willison

    Can JavaScript Escape a CSP Meta Tag Inside an Iframe? - Simon Willison

    2026-04-03
    Research: Can JavaScript Escape a CSP Meta Tag Inside an Iframe? In trying to build my own version of Claude Artifacts I got curious about options for applying CSP headers to content in sandboxed iframes without using a separate domain to host the...
  • The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering - Simon Willison

    The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering - Simon Willison

    2026-04-03
    The Axios team have published a full postmortem on the supply chain attack which resulted in a malware dependency going out in a release the other day, and it involved a sophisticated social engineering campaign targeting one of their maintainers...
  • Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast - Simon Willison

    Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast - Simon Willison

    2026-04-02
    I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts....
  • Gemma 4: Byte for byte, the most capable open models - Simon Willison

    Gemma 4: Byte for byte, the most capable open models - Simon Willison

    2026-04-02
    Gemma 4: Byte for byte, the most capable open models Four new vision-capable Apache 2.0 licensed reasoning LLMs from Google DeepMind, sized at 2B, 4B, 31B, plus a 26B-A4B Mixture-of-Experts. Google emphasize "unprecedented level of...
  • llm-gemini 0.30 - Simon Willison

    llm-gemini 0.30 - Simon Willison

    2026-04-02
    Release: llm-gemini 0.30 New models gemini-3.1-flash-lite-preview, gemma-4-26b-a4b-it and gemma-4-31b-it. See my notes on Gemma 4. Tags: gemini, llm, gemma