Simon Willison — 2026-06-03#

Highlight#

Simon’s breakdown of Uber’s new $1,500 monthly cap on AI coding agents is a fascinating look at the real enterprise economics of token-burning tools. It puts a concrete dollar value on developer augmentation, framing AI spend as a direct percentage of software engineer compensation rather than just another standard SaaS subscription.

Posts#

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs · Source Simon comments on a Bloomberg report that Uber is capping employee spending on agentic coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor to $1,500 per tool per month. He calculates that for two actively used tools, this translates to an annual cap of $36,000, which represents roughly 11% of the $330,000 median compensation for an Uber software engineer. Simon views this limit as a highly rational policy to manage token-burning costs, especially compared to gamified usage leaderboards, and notes that even his own heavy usage would still leave him with $500 a month to spare under this cap.

datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0 · Source Simon released an alpha version of a new tool aimed at allowing Datasette Agent to safely generate and execute Python code. He notes that these early sandboxing efforts are proving highly effective, as GPT-5.5 has thus far been unable to break out of the execution environment.

micropython-wasm 0.1a0 · Source This release introduces a new sandboxing experiment that bundles a lightly customized WebAssembly build of MicroPython. It includes a wrapper specifically designed to execute code securely within the sandbox using wasmtime.

micropython-wasm 0.1a1 · Source A quick follow-up patch to the initial alpha, resolving specific limitations Simon encountered while trying to use the package to build his datasette-agent-micropython project.

Project Pulse#

Simon is heavily focused on safe code execution for LLMs today, releasing a burst of alphas centered around a WebAssembly-based MicroPython sandbox. This infrastructure is being purpose-built to empower his Datasette Agent to safely generate and run Python code locally.