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 simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/4/n...

New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging

I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side …

simonwillison.net

The MiniMax-H3 video generation model is a lot of fun - here's what I generated on my M5 Pro Mac for the prompt "a rainbow colored skunk leaps over a mossy log in a supermarket" (~115GB model download, took around 45 minutes to generate) - notes on how I ran it here simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/4/m...

Question for dog companions: are you aware that "nose work" is a sport you can participate in with your dog? We've been doing it with Cleo and it is ABSURDLY fun. Dogs have to find 3 different official hidden scents (clove, anise, birch) - you have to accompany them and call it when they find them

Here's my attempt at summarizing the various "open letters" about AI development that have been doing the rounds over the past few weeks simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/2/o...

Got a disappointing pelican from DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 at default reasoning mode - on the left - but then I bumped reasoning up to high (via OpenRouter) and got the much better one on the right simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/...

The new stateless MCP specification has rekindled my interest in MCP, and inspired some new projects, including mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/31/...

Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp)

Tuesday was Stateless MCP day—the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant …

simonwillison.net

I'm on Oxide and Friends podcast this week! We talked about accidental cyberattacks, Kimi K3, Golden Gate Claude, Zizians, Alameda wild turkey attacks, Soviet Marburg virus research, the Lead-crime hypothesis, and a bunch of other worthy digressions oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/the...

Oxide and Friends | The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison

Simon Willison joined Bryan and Adam to discuss a wild couple of weeks in AI. First, we have a high-profile, AI-induced, AI-diagnosed security incident. Next we have the rise of frontier-class open...

oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm

I've been working with Prime Radiant building a new tool for running small eval suites against models, harnesses, and prompts - it's called "smevals", you can try it with "uvx smevals docs", and I wrote about it here: primeradiant.com/blog/2026/sm...

Your infrequent reminder that if you live near the San Francisco Bay Area you should go to Moss Landing (south of Santa Cruz) and rent kayaks there, because the estuary is full of sea otters and you will encounter dozens of them

🐧 Wanted to jump in on the pelican riding a bicycle trend, but I think I did it wrong. 🤔 Claude Opus 5 + OpenSCAD. #ai #3dprinting

A new TIL on adding custom MCP servers to both the ChatGPT and Claude regular chat interfaces - it's a little less obvious than I had hoped, but I got there in the end til.simonwillison.net/llms/mcp-in-...

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

Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline of the July 2026 Incident

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

huggingface.co

It has been a WILD couple of weeks in AI -- it's clear the open weight revolution is truly upon us -- and I am thrilled to announce that @simonwillison.net will be joining @ahl.bsky.social and me to help us make sense of it all! Join us today, 5p Pacific! discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

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) simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/25/...

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 simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/22/...

San Francisco tip: it only costs around $15 ($10 in quarters plus a $5 bill for the self-playing violin) to activate every single Orchestrion in Musée Mécanique

Today at Pier 39 in San Francisco I learned that if you want to take a good photograph of a sea lion, you should aim to get their teeth

I interviewed Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from the Claude Code team at the AI engineer World's Fair a couple of weeks ago - the video is now out, so I've published an annotated transcript of our conversation simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/21/...

A Fireside Chat with Cat and Thariq from the Claude Code team

Earlier this month I hosted a fireside chat session at the AI Engineer World’s Fair with Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team. We talked about Claude …

simonwillison.net

I got a fun photo last night of a California Brown Pelican surrounded by Elegant Terns

If you have Claude Code installed you're running software that uses the new (unreleased) version of Bun that's been rewritten in Rust - here are two commands you can run to see that for yourself simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/19/...

Suggestion for hyperscalers feeling pressure over data center water use: Buy up a few exclusive country clubs, convert the golf courses into public parks, pay for guides and binoculars to get the previous members into birdwatching - help them embrace a more sustainable hobby!

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) simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/16/...

Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 this morning, describing it as their “most capable model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters”. It’s currently available via their website and …

simonwillison.net

I poked around in the just open sourced Grok Build CLI tool - 844,000 lines of Rust code! - and dug up a few interesting highlights, including a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" that renders them using Unicode box-art! simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/15/...

Made myself a custom Codex pet today (you'll never guess what it was), and had some fun reverse-engineering how the feature works - it generates animated sprite sheets using gpt-image-2 simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/14/...

simonw/pedalican

Clearly I wasn't paying attention when these were first announced back in May, but today I accidentally activated a "pet" in Codex Desktop - a little animated robot, reminiscent of …

simonwillison.net

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 til.simonwillison.net/github-actio...

Trying to figure out the logistics of how you would go about nationalising Adele

The Vergecast continues to be *so good* - I learn a bunch of new things every time I listen to it, and the quality of the commentary is universally excellent Just listened to the latest episode about Netflix content strategy and Meta’s smart glasses www.theverge.com/podcast/9640...

Netflix is turning into YouTube

On The Vergecast: The ongoing fight against sleep, Meta’s smart glasses mess, and the good thing about dumb TVs.

theverge.com

Convinced that they’ve benchmaxxed this, I asked 5.6 Sol (High) for a SVG of a bicycle riding a pelican. It did well.

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: simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/9/g...

The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol

OpenAI’s latest flagship model hit general availability this morning, and comes in three sizes: Luna, Terra, and Sol (from smallest to largest). The new models are priced per 1M input/output …

simonwillison.net

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! simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/7/s...