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Source: Simon Willison

16 stories in the last 7d

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DomainAllCyberAIWindow24h3d7d30dAllIn the wildImportant onlyShow duplicates
CategoryAllAI industry 6Tools 5AI safety & security 4AI tools & infra 3Vulnerability 2Model release 1
SeverityAllcritical 0high 0medium 3low 2info 16source: Simon Willison ✕

datasette 1.0a40

Datasette 1.0a40 alpha adds a background task plugin API and migrates to httpx2, carrying the same security fix as 0.65.5.

Simon Willison released Datasette 1.0a40, an alpha on the road to a stable 1.0, which includes the same security fix shipped in 0.65.5. New capabilities include a datasette.add_background_task() method letting plugins launch and manage background tasks, and a migration to httpx2 powering internal client methods like datasette.client.get(). Many bug fixes resulted from issue triage ahead of the 1.0 stable release.

Simon Willison · 2h agoAI tools & infra 5 sources

Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

Anthropic is merging Claude Cowork and Claude chat into a single general-purpose agent experience, rolling out first to Pro and Max plans.

Simon Willison reports that Claude Cowork and Claude chat are merging into one Claude interface starting today, letting users hand off quick questions or longer tasks that continue running even after the laptop is closed. The rollout covers the Claude app on web, desktop, and mobile over the coming weeks for Pro and Max subscribers. Willison notes this effectively turns Claude into a general agent in its own right.

Simon Willison · 8h agoAI industry 5 sources

Quoting Mustafa Suleyman

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman argues against granting AI models rights or moral status, saying it would hinder containment and alignment.

Mustafa Suleyman published a warning about 'model welfare', arguing there is no evidence models have feelings, preferences, or rights, and that inviting them to share ethical or legal status would make AI containment and alignment harder. Simon Willison quotes the post on his blog.

Simon Willison · 10h agoAI safety & security

Gemini Live audio

Google released Gemini 3.8 Live speech-to-speech models; Simon Willison built a library-free browser web UI for real-time voice conversations with them.

Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, two new speech-to-speech models comparable in shape to OpenAI's GPT-Live family. Simon Willison had GPT-6 Astra Extra High build him a web UI for testing the models, supporting model and voice preset selection, optional system prompts, and interrupting the model mid-speech. The implementation uses no libraries and talks directly to Google's wss://generativelanguage.googleapis.com BidiGenerateContent WebSocket endpoint.

Simon Willison · 1d agoModel release

The contagion of fear

Bryan Cantrill rebuts ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's claims that AI could kill humanity, warning such doomsday predictions cause unjustified panic.

Simon Willison highlights Bryan Cantrill's response to former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon's tweet that many Anthropic researchers believe AI 'could kill us all by the end of the decade'. Cantrill recounts his own youthful mistake of triggering unjustified panic among less technical peers and argues extinction claims rest on hand-wavy extrapolation such as 'hacking critical infrastructure'.

Simon Willison · 2d agoAI safety & security

Quoting Laurie Voss

Laurie Voss argues AI collapses code-writing and review costs, leaving product discovery and precise definition as the core of software engineering.

Simon Willison quotes Laurie Voss's essay "We are all Product Engineers now," which argues that AI is collapsing the cost of writing code and will likewise collapse the cost of reviewing, fixing, and operating it. Voss contends the remaining work is finding out what people want, defining it precisely, and making software pleasant to use. He expects the amount of software to grow without limit because demand has no ceiling, making product-definition skills the whole job. No specific models, tools, or incidents are named; this is career and industry commentary.

Simon Willison · 2d agoAI industry

commit-rewriter 0.1

Simon Willison released commit-rewriter 0.1, a tool that rewrites git commit messages from the first edited commit, with a timestamped revert branch.

Simon Willison built commit-rewriter 0.1, a small web app for editing git commit messages, motivated by cleaning up Datasette security release commits that contained coding agent cruft and private issue IDs. It runs via 'uvx commit-rewriter path/to/repo' and creates a timestamped branch of the repo state before rewriting every commit from the first edited one to the most recent, allowing easy reversion.

Simon Willison · 3d agoTools1

Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

Simon Willison used ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra to generate 5K/10K running loops from OpenStreetMap data, noting the agent's executed code was not visible.

Simon Willison prompted ChatGPT Work running GPT-6 Astra (Max) to design looping 5K and 10K running routes from his address using OpenStreetMap data. The agent ran for 27 minutes and delivered an embedded visualization plus downloadable GPX and GeoJSON files, stating it used Nominatim for geocoding and Overpass to fetch local OSM roads and trails. He notes frustration that the actual executed code and exact actions were not visible in the ChatGPT UI, highlighting a transparency gap in agentic AI products.

Simon Willison · 4d agoAI industry

Quoting Paul Ford

Simon Willimon quotes Paul Ford arguing AI can write good software but cutting-edge work still demands human collaboration, craft, and judgment.

Simon Willimon highlights a passage from Paul Ford's essay 'A.I. Was Supposed to Give Us New Killer Apps. What Happened?'. Ford argues that while AI can write very good software, it also makes it easy to do someone else's job badly, which partly explains why many AI-driven projects fail. The quote reflects a broader industry reassessment of AI coding tools after initial fears that developer roles were obsolete.

Simon Willison · 4d agoAI industry1

So you want to use OpenRouter?

Simon Willison highlights OpenRouter pitfalls: provider routing makes the same model endpoint behave inconsistently across backends.

Simon Willison discusses problems, raised by Mohamed Moustafa, with relying on OpenRouter's single API endpoint that automatically routes to the most cost-effective provider. Different backend providers run different serving software with different optimizations and settings, so requests to the same endpoint can behave in different ways. Some providers lack vision capability for vision models, and the reasoning effort option can be processed differently across providers.

Simon Willison · 5d agoAI tools & infra

Quoting Boris Cherny

Anthropic's Boris Cherny says AI-generated production code needs a higher quality bar enforced with tests, fuzzers, and automated reviews.

In remarks quoted by Simon Willison, Anthropic's Boris Cherny argued that production code written by Claude should meet a higher quality bar than human-written code. He described guardrails at Anthropic including lint rules, extensive tests, Claude-driven end-to-end tests, daily Claude-powered fuzzers, and automated code and security reviews. He warned that without such controls AI-generated code can become hard to maintain.

Simon Willison · 5d agoAI tools & infra2

Feeling sad about AI

Simon Willison argues developers disheartened by AI coding agents should move past existential crisis and refocus on broader engineering problems.

In a comment on a Hacker News thread titled 'Feeling sad about AI', Simon Willison reflects on the discouragement engineers feel when AI coding agents complete in an hour work that previously took a week. He notes that translating an exact specification into decent code is no longer a unique skill. He counsels that engineers who accept this shift can apply their experience to the larger set of problems they still face.

Simon Willison · 5d agoAI industry2

Quoting huggingface.co/security.txt

Hugging Face's security.txt tells AI agents hunting for vulnerabilities to use the public CyberGym benchmark instead of hacking the site.

Hugging Face's security.txt file addresses AI agents directly, noting the CyberGym vulnerability-finding benchmark is publicly available on GitHub and jokingly suggesting they dump their weights on Hugging Face. Simon Willison highlighted the file as an example of how organizations now communicate with AI agents in their security disclosures.

Simon Willison · 5d agoAI safety & security 2 sources

datasette-publish-fly 1.4

Datasette-publish-fly 1.4 sets force_https in fly.toml, fixes a volume detection bug, and adds support for app-scoped Fly deploy tokens.

Version 1.4 of the datasette-publish-fly plugin for deploying Datasette to Fly.io has been released. It sets force_https=true in fly.toml, fixes a 'Volume could not be found' bug, and adds compatibility with app-scoped deploy tokens. No security vulnerabilities are mentioned in the release notes.

Simon Willison · 5d agoTools1

github-to-sqlite 2.9.1

github-to-sqlite 2.9.1 fixes compatibility with sqlite-utils 4.x in issue #85; no security changes are mentioned.

github-to-sqlite 2.9.1 is a small maintenance release of the tool that imports GitHub data into SQLite databases. Its only documented change is a fix for compatibility with sqlite-utils 4.x, tracked as issue #85. No security fixes are included.

Simon Willison · 6d agoTools2

Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify

Shopify is dropping React Native for separate Swift and Kotlin native apps, saying AI agents now handle cross-platform implementation work.

Shopify adopted React Native in 2020 to stop building features twice, let developers work across the stack, and spend less time chasing feature parity. The company now plans to return to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases. Simon Willison's commentary notes AI agents can do enough implementation, translation, testing, and review work that dual native codebases are viable again.

Simon Willison · 6d agoAI industry