2026-04-19

Blogs, AI, Tech
Apis, AI, Saas, Salesforce

Simon Willison — 2026-04-19#

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The most thought-provoking piece today examines the resurgence of APIs, driven by the rapid rise of personal AI agents that need programmable access to services. With industry giants pivoting to “headless” models, robust API access is quickly shifting from technical debt to the ultimate competitive advantage for software products.

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Headless everything for personal AI · Source Simon highlights a trend identified by Matt Webb: headless services are poised for a massive comeback because AI agents operate far more efficiently via APIs than by awkwardly clicking around a GUI with a bot-controlled mouse. This isn’t just a niche developer theory; Marc Benioff recently announced “Salesforce Headless 360,” which exposes their entire platform via APIs and eliminates the need for a browser so agents can access workflows directly. Simon points out the massive implications this has for traditional per-seat SaaS pricing models, which will inevitably be thrown into havoc as agents replace human seats. Drawing on a piece by Brandur Leach, he notes that we are entering the “Second Wave of the API-first Economy,” where offering an API has evolved from a liability into the crucial deciding factor that allows a service to win in a crowded and relatively undifferentiated market.

2026-05-17

Blogs, AI, Tech
Open Source, Security, AI, Gov-Uk

Simon Willison — 2026-05-17#

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The NHS recently decided to close its open-source repositories in response to AI-discovered vulnerabilities, but the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) is publicly pushing back. Simon highlights this rare public clash between UK civil service branches over the critical issue of AI security and open-source by-default policies.

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GDS weighs in on the NHS’s decision to retreat from Open Source · Source Simon points to Terence Eden’s continued coverage of the NHS’s poorly considered decision to lock down access to open-source repositories following vulnerabilities flagged by Project Glasswing. The UK Government Digital Service (GDS) has stepped in with a new publication on AI and open code, strongly recommending that public sector code remain “open by default” because closing everything adds delivery costs and reduces both code reuse and scrutiny. Terence Eden observes that this public disagreement—described as a frosty “meeting without biscuits”—represents a major escalation within the civil service over how to handle open-source security in the age of AI.

2026-05-28

Blogs, AI, Tech
Anthropic, Claude, Llms, Generative-Ai, AI

Simon Willison — 2026-05-28#

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Anthropic’s release of Claude Opus 4.8 brings welcome improvements to model honesty and prompt caching, which Simon immediately put to the test using his newly updated llm-anthropic CLI plugin to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles.

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Claude Opus 4.8: “a modest but tangible improvement” Simon highlights Anthropic’s refreshing honesty in marketing this release as an incremental upgrade, noting the model’s decreased hallucination rate achieved by simply abstaining when uncertain. Key technical changes include a reduced prompt cache minimum of 1,024 tokens and the ability to insert system messages mid-conversation, which preserves cache hits and reduces input costs in agentic loops. He tested the model by generating SVG pelicans riding bicycles at different thinking levels via his LLM CLI, using Opus 4.8 to build the rendering HTML tool and relying on GPT-5.5 as a “code security blanket” to patch XSS vulnerabilities.

2026-05-30

Blogs, AI, Tech
AI, Datasette, Sandboxing, Open Source, Python

Simon Willison — 2026-05-30#

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Today’s standout is Simon’s breakthrough in running ASGI apps entirely in the browser using Pyodide and Service Workers. Guided by Claude Opus 4.8, this research paves the way for a major architectural upgrade to Datasette Lite, solving longstanding issues with JavaScript execution and plugin compatibility that plagued the older Web Worker approach.

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Running Python ASGI apps in the browser via Pyodide + a service worker · Source Simon documents a successful experiment using Claude Opus 4.8 to transition Datasette Lite from Web Workers to Service Workers. The previous Web Worker approach intercepted navigation but unfortunately broke inline <script> tags and numerous Datasette plugins. The new service worker method successfully runs a basic ASGI FastCGI demo and Datasette 1.0a31. Simon plans to fully implement this upgrade into Datasette Lite once he completely wraps his head around the AI-generated solution.

2026-06-04

Blogs, AI, Tech
AI, Google, Ai Ethics, Agentic-Engineering

Simon Willison — 2026-06-04#

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Simon shares a fantastic piece from Charity Majors that articulates the current tug-of-war in engineering teams: the race to leverage AI capabilities versus the threat of unmaintainable, auto-generated code. It is a highly relevant read for any engineering leader struggling to balance the speed of AI-assisted development with the long-term health and comprehensibility of their systems.

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AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Simon highlights a piece by Charity Majors that perfectly captures the dynamic between fast-moving AI enthusiasts and cautious AI skeptics within software teams. Majors argues that both sides are entirely correct: missing the AI wave is a genuine existential business threat, but shipping code faster than engineers can read it destroys institutional knowledge and creates a separate existential threat of system incoherence. The core organizational design challenge right now is building natural feedback loops to mend the gap between these two realities.

2026-06-07

Blogs, AI, Tech
AI, Datasette, Llm-Tool-Use, Generative-Ai

Simon Willison — 2026-06-07#

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Simon released an early alpha of a foundational plugin that brings Claude-inspired, agentic text editing tools to the Datasette ecosystem. This creates a reliable, standardized baseline for future plugins that need to safely edit Markdown, SQL, or SVGs.

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datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 · Source Simon released datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 as a base plugin to simplify agentic text modifications, such as collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, or tweaking SVG files. Noting that LLM-driven text editing is notoriously tricky to get right, he modeled the core tools—view (with line numbers), strict str_replace (which fails if the string isn’t unique), and line-based insert—directly on the published design of the Claude text editor. Rather than recreating these common patterns for every new tool, future Datasette Agent plugins can simply adapt these proven fundamentals.

2026-06-12

Blogs, AI, Tech
AI, Openai, Webrtc, Audio, Tools

Simon Willison — 2026-06-12#

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Simon updated his OpenAI WebRTC audio playground to support the newly released GPT-Realtime-2 model and added support for custom document context. This highlights a great use case for building small, sharp tools: bypassing official app delays to immediately experiment with bleeding-edge AI capabilities on your own terms.

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OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context · Source Simon revisited and upgraded a browser-based tool he originally built in December 2024 for interacting with OpenAI’s realtime audio API. Users can now select GPT-Realtime-2—a model promoted as having “GPT-5-class reasoning”—because it still hasn’t rolled out to the official ChatGPT iPhone app. Most practically, he added a feature to paste large chunks of document context directly into the tool, enabling interactive audio conversations grounded in specific reference material.

2026-06-19

Blogs, AI, Tech
Datasette, Model Context Protocol, Llms, AI

Simon Willison — 2026-06-19#

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The standout insight today comes from a quote on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), highlighting how its real value lies in isolating authentication flows outside of an AI agent’s context window. It’s a sharp observation on how we should be architecting tool use and permissions for LLMs to make them safer and more robust.

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[Quoting Sean Lynch] · Source Simon highlights a sharp Hacker News comment from Sean Lynch regarding the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Lynch notes that the true advantage of MCP over traditional skills or CLIs is its ability to isolate authentication flows entirely outside of an agent’s context window. This framing suggests the idealized form of MCP might simply be an auth gateway for APIs, simplifying how LLMs interact with secured external resources.

2026-06-24

Blogs, AI, Tech
AI, Ai-Assisted-Programming, Github-Actions, Datasette-Lite, Careers

Simon Willison — 2026-06-24#

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Today’s most interesting post is Simon’s creation of browser-compat-db, demonstrating a clever mix of AI-assisted programming to convert Mozilla’s MDN compatibility data into a SQLite database, along with a neat CI/CD trick for hosting it. It perfectly encapsulates his workflow of using frontier models like Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 to rapidly build, deploy, and explore small, sharp data tools.

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simonw/browser-compat-db · Source Inspired by Mozilla’s new MDN Model Context Protocol (MCP) service, Simon used Claude Code for web (Opus 4.8) to write a script that converts the comprehensive browser compatibility repository into a ~66MB SQLite database. To bypass the fact that GitHub Releases do not provide open CORS headers, he utilized Codex Desktop (GPT-5.5) to build a GitHub Actions workflow that force-pushes the database to an “orphan” branch. This deployment strategy allows the database to be served via GitHub’s CDN with open CORS headers, enabling immediate exploration directly in the browser via Datasette Lite.

Tech, News, AI, Sports, Blogs, YouTube, Social Media
AI, Technology, Apple, Engineering, Software, Bloomberg, Seattle, Nfl, YouTube, Reddit, Social Media

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