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OpenAI has introduced GPT‑Live, an upgraded voice mode model for ChatGPT that can delegate complex tasks to GPT‑5.5 in the background while maintaining conversation flow. The author had preview access and notes the new model is a significant improvement over the previous GPT‑4o-based voice mode, though they encountered an early bug where the model inappropriately laughed at non-joke statements.

Kenton Varda declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions for his team, arguing that AI-generated PR and commit messages outline low-level code details visible in the code itself while omitting the higher-level context needed to understand what the code does broadly.

sqlite-utils 4.0 introduces database schema migrations, nested transactions, and compound foreign key support. The release also includes breaking changes like improved upsert handling, stricter db.query() behavior, and automatic CSV type detection.

Tencent released Hy3, a 295B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 21B active parameters, licensed under Apache 2.0. The model outperforms similar-size models and rivals flagship open-source models with 2-5x parameters, supporting a 256K context length. It is available for free on OpenRouter until July 21st.

sqlite-utils 4.0rc3 has been released with new support for compound foreign keys and case-insensitive column name matching following SQLite's convention. The stable 4.0 release was delayed as additional changes accumulated, including a breaking change to the table.foreign_keys interface.

Simon Willison's June 2026 sponsors-only newsletter is now available, covering topics such as Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6, US export restrictions, GLM-5.2, Datasette Apps, and various model releases. The newsletter is accessible to GitHub sponsors, with a $10/month sponsorship option to stay a month ahead of the free copy.

Simon Willison released llm-coding-agent 0.1a0, an experimental coding agent built on his LLM library. The agent provides tools for reading, editing, searching files and executing commands, and ships with a Python API and CLI. It was developed using Claude Code (Fable 5) via TDD with a spec-first approach, and is available as a slop-alpha on PyPI.

Simon Willison used DSPy to evaluate and improve Datasette Agent's SQL system prompts. DSPy identified that the schema listing lacked column names and that advice to avoid calling describe_table caused column-name guessing and error retries.

Simon Willison reflects on a talk by Geoffrey Litt at AIE, who argued that when collaborating with coding agents, developers must understand the code deeply enough to remain active participants in the creative process, avoiding cognitive debt from drifting understanding.

Anthropic announced that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, and that they will begin restoring access tomorrow with a further update to follow.

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, which performs close to Opus 4.8 at lower prices. Key changes include a new tokenizer producing ~30% more tokens (effectively a 30% price increase), a 1M token context window, removal of temperature/top_p/top_k sampling parameters, and adaptive thinking enabled by default.

Google released Nano Banana 2 Lite (Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image), described as the fastest and cheapest Gemini image model for high-volume use. Simon Willison tested it with a "Where's Waldo"-style prompt and found the results better than previous Nano Banana models, though the model made spelling errors in the generated image.

The AI Compass is a 29-question political compass-style quiz about AI and AI ethics that assigns users one of 30 archetypes. The author, Simon Willison, took the quiz and was categorized as "The Garage Tinkerer," which they found fitting. The quiz is built as a single-page React app without a build step.

shot-scraper 1.10 has been released. The main new feature is the "shot-scraper video storyboard.yml" command, which enables agents to record video demos of their work.

shot-scraper 1.10 introduces a "video" command that uses Playwright to record demos of web app routines defined in a YAML storyboard file. The feature enables coding agents to automatically produce video demonstrations of their work.

Simon Willison released an HTML table extractor tool that lets users paste rich text with embedded HTML tables and convert them into HTML, Markdown, CSV, TSV, or JSON format. The tool is part of his growing collection of paste-conversion utilities. He also recently rebuilt his Rich text to markdown tool with improved table support.

A quick tip shows how to count open Safari tabs using an AppleScript command: "osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to count tabs of every window'". The author ran it and discovered they had 370 tabs open.

DeepReinforce has released Ornith-1.0, an open-weights (MIT licensed) family of self-scaffolding LLMs for agentic coding, built on Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5 with variants up to 397B parameters. Initial testing with the 35B GGUF model shows strong performance on coding agent tasks, running proficiently through many tool calls.

Hack Your Summer is a free 4-week production sprint for US undergraduate and graduate students who couldn't secure an internship due to the current hiring slowdown. Participants build real, public-facing projects with mentorship and peer support. A second cohort starts July 13; students can apply by July 8, and volunteer mentors are also needed.