Simon Willison — 2026-06-29#

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Today’s standout piece is a hands-on exploration of Ornith-1.0, a newly released family of open-weights models specifically optimized for agentic coding. Simon tests its local execution capabilities and tool-calling proficiency, signaling another practical step forward for open-source AI developer tooling.

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Ornith-1.0: Self-Scaffolding LLMs for Agentic Coding Simon goes hands-on with Ornith-1.0, a new MIT-licensed model family from DeepReinforce built on top of Gemma 4 and Qwen 3.5. Testing the 35B MoE variant locally via LM Studio, he finds it highly proficient at executing agent harnesses and running tool calls against a Datasette checkout. He highlights that the underlying models use clean Apache 2.0 licenses, successfully avoiding the “janky” terms of use that affected earlier Gemma models.