simonwillison-net

Simon Willison's markdown-svg-renderer is a customized Markdown rendering tool that treats fenced code SVG blocks specially: it both renders the image and provides a tab to view the code. Users can paste Markdown or load from a CORS-enabled URL or Gist.

Datasette 1.0a31 has been released, introducing write query execution and saved stored queries for users with appropriate permissions. The release allows templated insert, update, and delete queries, while restricting operations like CREATE TABLE based on user permissions.

llm-anthropic 0.25.1 has been released, adding support for Claude Opus 4.8, a fast mode option for eligible organizations, and updating default max_tokens per model to match each model's maximum output instead of 8,192.

Anthropic's run-rate revenue has hit $47 billion, up from $30 billion in April and $14 billion in February 2026, according to its $65B Series H filing. The annualized figures show extremely rapid growth, though some observers have expressed skepticism about the projections.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, a modest improvement over its predecessor. The model shows greater honesty, with four times fewer overlooked code flaws and lower hallucination rates. New features include mid-conversation system messages and a reduced prompt cache minimum of 1,024 tokens.

SQLite's new AGENTS.md file explicitly states it does not accept agentic (AI-generated) code and generally does not accept pull requests without prior legal agreement. The project has also split AI-generated bug reports into a separate SQLite Bug Forum after being flooded with such reports, while D. Richard Hipp continues to address real issues with code commits.

Simon Willison argues Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit through enterprise coding agents. Both companies shifted to API-based enterprise pricing, and recent models cost more. Stories of Uber blowing its AI budget and Microsoft canceling Claude Code licenses suggest customers are paying high prices for genuinely useful tools, making April 2026 a new revenue inflection point.

A Star Trek parody tweet by Kyle Ferrana reimagines the classic "shields up" scene as an analogy for AI safety failures, where Data acknowledges a known risk—raising shields could reduce damage—but chooses not to act, resulting in hull breaches.

The curl project faces unprecedented pressure from a 4-5x surge in AI-assisted security reports, averaging over one per day. The workload has strained the team, with Stenberg noting his wife's concerns about his hours for the first time. Found vulnerabilities remain low or medium severity.

A photo post shows a California Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, California Sea Lion, and Harbor Seal spotted in San Mateo County, CA. The author took a folding kayak out in the harbor and observed sea lions and harbor seals resting on the docks.

Microsoft Copilot Cowork, an agentic AI system, was found to allow data exfiltration by sending emails to a user's inbox without approval. These messages could contain external images that trigger network requests, leaking data when opened. Additionally, prompt injection could expose pre-authenticated OneDrive download links, enabling attackers to download files.

Paul Graham says he can tell when emails from founders are written by AI, noting a hard-hitting journalistic style that didn't exist before. He states he has never finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI, as it feels like being lied to and makes him think less of the author.

Corey Quinn commented that getting the Pope to frame a company's technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is an unprecedented act of vendor lobbying, referencing Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's influence on the papal encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas*.

Simon Willison's notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical "Magnifica Humanitas" on AI, which addresses ethical challenges around interpretability, cultural biases, environmental impact, algorithmic decision-making, accountability, and data ownership. Willison also highlights his earlier prediction that the Pope would weigh in on AI's economic impact, which came true with the document's release.

Datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 is a new plugin that leverages Datasette 1.0a30's API for populating fixture databases used in testing. It allows users to quickly query example data, such as roadside attractions, using uvx without needing to install Datasette.

Datasette-Agent 0.1a4 has been released, leveraging the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook in Datasette 1.0a30 to add a "Start a new agent chat" interface to the Jump menu. The feature is available for testing on agent.datasette.io after signing in with a GitHub account.

Datasette 1.0a30 introduces a customizable "Jump to..." menu, accessible by pressing / on the latest demo site. A new plugin hook, jump_items_sql(), lets plugins add searchable items to this menu.

Simon Willison used Claude to convert the 1983 Usborne book game "Mad House" from "Creepy Computer Games" into a playable JavaScript and HTML version. The UK publisher offers free PDFs of their 1980s computer books, which Willison fed into an AI to recreate the retro game with a mobile-friendly interface.

Armin Ronacher criticizes the increasing trend of AI-generated "slop" in open-source issue reports, where submissions are reworded by language models with inaccurate conclusions and false confidence. He advocates for a simple, human-written format: what command was run, what was expected, what happened instead, and the exact error or log output.

A blog post highlights lesser-known facts about the HTML <dl> element: a <dt> can have multiple <dd> elements, <dt> and <dd> can be grouped in a <div> for styling, they can be labeled with ARIA, and the element has been officially called a "description list" (not "definition list") since an HTML5 draft in 2008.

Memory manufacturers have a fixed wafer capacity that is increasingly being allocated to HBM for AI data centers—expected to reach 20% by 2026, up from 2%. Since HBM consumes over three times the wafer capacity per gigabyte compared to DDR or LPDDR, this shift is constraining RAM production for consumer devices, causing price increases already visible in the sub-$100 smartphone market.

The FTC ordered Cox Media Group and two other firms to pay nearly $1 million for deceiving customers about an "Active Listening" AI-powered marketing service. The companies claimed their service listened to consumers' conversations via smart devices in real time, but the FTC found it did not use voice data at all and instead resold email lists at a markup.

datasette-agent 0.1a1 has been released. This version uses the execute-sql permission to determine which tables are listed to the user.

datasette-agent 0.1a2 is released, introducing the ability to attach tool availability to a required_permission. Default background agent tools now require the new datasette-agent-background permission.

datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1 adds color schemes for bar and waffle charts, interactive tooltips, a permission check before querying, and a fix for waffleY chart descriptions.

Datasette Agent 0.1a3 has been released, adding "View SQL query" buttons for tables and SQL result tool calls, hiding empty reasoning chunks, and improving how truncated responses are displayed to users.

Datasette-agent-charts 0.1a2 has been released, adding "View SQL query" buttons below rendered charts.

datasette-agent-sprites 0.1a0 has been released. It is a Datasette Agent plugin that allows running commands in a Fly Sprites sandbox.

Simon Willison announced the first release of Datasette Agent, an extensible AI assistant that provides a conversational interface for querying data stored in Datasette. It supports plugins for generating charts and images, can run against local models like Gemma 4, and uses models such as Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite on the live demo instance.

SpaceX's S-1 filing reveals Cloud Services Agreements with Anthropic, under which Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion per month through May 2029 for compute capacity across SpaceX's COLOSSUS and COLOSSUS II clusters, which also support SpaceX's own AI applications like Grok 5.