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Site URL: simonwillison.net/
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Posts: 19
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The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/4/astra-pelicans/
Published: September 4, 2026 23:59
I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison…
OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/4/rogue-agent-wikis/
Published: September 4, 2026 17:38
Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some…
August newsletter is out
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/4/august-newsletter/
Published: September 4, 2026 05:54
The August edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: We got more details on OpenAl's accidental cyberattacks One-shotting Raccoon Heist games with…
GPT‑6 Astra
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/3/gpt6-astra/
Published: September 3, 2026 20:18
GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is "rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS" - I've not tried it yet…
llm-gemini 0.34
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/llm-gemini/
Published: September 2, 2026 16:39
Release: llm-gemini 0.34 New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash, with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146 Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version. Thanks, Charlie Tonneslan. #137 …
Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/claudes-new-system-prompt/
Published: September 2, 2026 14:16
Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes…
Quoting Rick Brewster
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/2/rick-brewster/
Published: September 2, 2026 05:50
Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch,…
Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/claude-fable-5-1/
Published: September 1, 2026 23:57
Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a…
Codex bundles LibreOffice
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/codex-libreoffice/
Published: September 1, 2026 19:03
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full…
Quoting Tarn Adams
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/tarn-adams/
Published: September 1, 2026 17:01
They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes — Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress Tags: ai, game-design
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here!
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/1/python-315-rc-2/
Published: September 1, 2026 14:59
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which…
Introducing wrapture
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/31/introducing-wrapture/
Published: August 31, 2026 23:59
Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and tracing at the same time. Wrapture (full…
Quoting Andrew Digby
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/31/andrew-digby/
Published: August 31, 2026 22:25
325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible with sustained effort. — Andrew Digby,…
Understanding ChatGPT Work
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/30/understanding-chatgpt-work/
Published: August 30, 2026 23:59
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more…
Introducing Hy4 Preview
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/29/hy4/
Published: August 29, 2026 23:53
Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face. This is a big size increase from their previous Hy3 in…
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/28/just-a-rumour-of-a-bug/
Published: August 28, 2026 22:12
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat alarming post he reports that security issues in OCaml…
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/27/breaking-claude-code-opus-5-auto-mode/
Published: August 27, 2026 22:50
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its…
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/26/qwen38-flash-next/
Published: August 26, 2026 23:52
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…
Quoting Paul Dix
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/26/paul-dix/
Published: August 26, 2026 08:07
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…