Simon Willison — 2026-07-14#

Highlight#

Simon’s deep-dive into creating a custom animated desktop “pet” using Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol is a fantastic look at AI-driven asset generation. He documents the exact multi-stage prompts used to create perfect sprite sheets with magenta chroma-key backgrounds, showing how generative models can reliably output structured, game-ready images.

Posts#

simonw/pedalican Simon accidentally activated a Codex Desktop pet and immediately set out to build his own: a pelican riding a bicycle. He details the pipeline of using GPT-5.6 Sol and gpt-image-2 to generate the required sprite sheets, including the precise prompts used to keep the character consistent on a flat magenta background. It’s a great practical example of using text-to-image models to generate functional, game-ready assets.

lobste.rs is now running on SQLite Community site Lobsters has successfully migrated their primary database from MariaDB to a 3.8GB SQLite file on a single VPS. Simon highlights this as a stellar 2026 case study for single-server architectures, noting that the migration reduced CPU usage, memory consumption, and hosting costs by half.

Using uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly way To avoid hitting PyPI on every GitHub Actions workflow run, Simon shares a clever caching recipe for Python tools. By setting a UV_EXCLUDE_NEWER environment variable with a specific date and including it in the cache key, you can securely run the latest tools and only bust the cache when you explicitly bump the date.

Quoting GitHub Changelog Dependabot now requires new package releases to exist for three days before opening a version update pull request. Simon is thrilled to see GitHub embracing this “dependency cooldown” by default, as it significantly bolsters supply chain security without needing any manual configuration.

datasette 1.0a37 A minor release for Datasette that brings performance and documentation improvements to the permissions system. Crucially, Simon reverted a cosmetic API change that had accidentally broken almost all existing plugin test suites.

Quoting Armin Ronacher Simon highlights a thought-provoking quote from Armin Ronacher about how software engineering’s “shared language” is traditionally built through human friction and synchronization. It serves as a fascinating counterpoint to the rise of coding agents, questioning what institutional knowledge might be lost when that friction is smoothed away.

Project Pulse#

Today’s updates highlight a great mix of practical developer operations—like CI caching and single-server SQLite scaling—alongside forward-looking explorations into AI-assisted programming and agentic workflows. Simon continues to demonstrate how modern tools are reducing friction in infrastructure while simultaneously opening up entirely new creative avenues for developers.