tail -f

A river of the small web — quiet blogs, followed.

"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

Xe Iaso · Aug 27, 2026

In the hours following the release of CVE-2026-41992 for the project GNU gzip, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix decompressing two files in the same invocation of gzip (that's possible???) an…

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Simon Willison · Aug 26, 2026

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4". It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but only 6B active which means it gets a pretty big performance boost. I've been…

Quoting Paul Dix

Simon Willison · Aug 26, 2026

The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because…

If your VS Code remotes stopped working, downgrade to v1.124.x

Xe Iaso · Aug 26, 2026

Quality software reigns again

How to make VS Code go back to the old UI

Xe Iaso · Aug 26, 2026

What do you wanna bet someone's gonna get promoted for deleting this workaround from the code?

EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!

Simon Willison · Aug 25, 2026

EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins! EVE Online has been one of the most interesting case studies in Python at scale for over twenty years now. They've been running on Stackless Python since their launch in 2003, and their last major upgrade was 16 years ago, to Stackless…

llm-anthropic 0.27

Simon Willison · Aug 24, 2026

Release: llm-anthropic 0.27 This release of the Anthropic plugin for LLM mainly provides compatibility with the recently released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which switches from httpx to httpx2. OpenAI made the same change in their v3.0.0 release two weeks ago. Anthropic…

Your executable is a SQLite database

Simon Willison · Aug 24, 2026

Your executable is a SQLite database Farid Zakaria describes a neat Linux pattern for creating a SQLite database file that can be directly used as an executable binary. The trick sets the SQLite file format's 4-byte application ID (68 bytes into the file) to SELF, standing for…

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

Simon Willison · Aug 23, 2026

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter": Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more…

Quoting Drew Breunig

Simon Willison · Aug 23, 2026

Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems. But then Fable landed. It was (and still is!) incredible. But the cost was so…

Quoting Linus Torvalds

Simon Willison · Aug 22, 2026

And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it. I suspect…

llm 0.33

Simon Willison · Aug 22, 2026

Release: llm 0.33 My highlights from this release: Upgraded to the OpenAI Python library 3.x and switched the HTTP client dependency from httpx to httpx2. #1608, #1631 I shipped a quick 0.32.1 fix for this yesterday, but this is the more comprehensive fix. llm embed and llm…

More than just code review

Simon Willison · Aug 22, 2026

The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way. Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have…

llm 0.32.1

Simon Willison · Aug 21, 2026

Release: llm 0.32.1 Fresh installs of LLM stopped working the other day because the OpenAI Python library dropped its usage of httpx, and it turned out LLM depended on that library but only installed it via a transitive openai dependency. This dot-release fixes that for the…

llm-openrouter 0.7

Simon Willison · Aug 21, 2026

Release: llm-openrouter 0.7 Now that this plugin is compatible with LLM 0.32 it can display the reasoning traces for LLMs available through OpenRouter. Updated for compatibility with LLM 0.32. Models now use OpenRouter's implementation of the Responses API. Three new server-side…

Stop Making TUIs

Simon Willison · Aug 21, 2026

Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU…

Quoting Matt Webb

Simon Willison · Aug 21, 2026

After I released version 1.0, I figured I would have to do the rotations myself. So I sat down with ChatGPT and I didn’t get it to write the code, but I got it to educate me. With a patient, interactive tutor, I was able to finally do what I hadn’t by reading books and asking…

ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale

Simon Willison · Aug 20, 2026

ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale Promptwatch is part of the emerging "GEO" space, for Generative Engine Optimization - the chatbot version of SEO, where companies offer tools and consulting to help your site increase its presence in replies to prompts inside…

A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView

Simon Willison · Aug 20, 2026

Research: A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView Today saw the long awaited release of Bun 1.4, the first stable version since the infamous Rust rewrite a few months ago. Interestingly, the Rust rewrite was downplayed in the release notes, which introduced a…

smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript

Simon Willison · Aug 19, 2026

Research: smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task: Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox. Explore what it would take to use this…

Quoting Jeremy Morrell

Simon Willison · Aug 19, 2026

My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable…

Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code

Simon Willison · Aug 19, 2026

Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very…

Anubis continues to expose new ways people configure webservers

Xe Iaso · Aug 19, 2026

TL;DR: if admins turn off browser features, those features won't work in confusing ways that are annoying to debug

Mojo🔥 is now open source

Simon Willison · Aug 18, 2026

Mojo🔥 is now open source The Mojo programming language has been promising an open source release since May 2023. Last week they shipped their 1.0 and today they have followed through on that original promise, releasing the compiler and toolchain under an Apache 2 license. When…

Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

Simon Willison · Aug 17, 2026

Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 753B and that DeepSeek is 1.7T parameters, and Luna is size unknown but…

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

Simon Willison · Aug 17, 2026

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous customers…

Markdown SVG upgrades

Simon Willison · Aug 16, 2026

I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans…

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things

Simon Willison · Aug 16, 2026

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was…

Quoting Dario Amodei

Simon Willison · Aug 16, 2026

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust…

Site update: a few posts have been removed

Xe Iaso · Aug 15, 2026

TL;DR: hospital drugs are some shit, man

Extending immutability: deletion without losing data

Xe Iaso · Aug 11, 2026

Tigris has a pretty advanced replication scheme for writes. What happens when you actually need to delete things? Turns out deleting things is hard in distributed systems. Especially when you have a geo-replicated active-active database like Tigris does. We can (and do) use…

Anubis v1.27.0: Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn

Xe Iaso · Aug 8, 2026

Anubis v1.27.0 (Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn) is now available via Docker and direct download from GitHub releases. This release adds Windows Server support, automatically renames cookies based on settings to avoid infinite challenge loops, adds two new localizations, and more…

SigV4 authentication is surprisingly complicated

Xe Iaso · Aug 6, 2026

SigV4 looks simple: sign a request, check the signature. Then you implement canonicalization, clock skew, and a cache that isn't allowed to hold your key. Tigris is a drop-in replacement for AWS S3 (or GCS, anything S3API compatible). As such, we need to be fully compatible with…