Simon Willison — 2026-05-08#

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Simon re-evaluates his long-standing habit of asking LLMs for Markdown output, sparked by Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar advocating for the rich capabilities of HTML. He tests this out practically by using his llm CLI to generate an interactive HTML explanation of a newly discovered Linux security exploit.

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[Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML] · Source Simon reflects on a piece by Thariq Shihipar (from Anthropic’s Claude Code team) that argues for requesting HTML instead of Markdown from Claude. While Markdown’s token-efficiency was a strict necessity during the 8,192-token GPT-4 days, modern LLMs can leverage HTML to output SVG diagrams, interactive widgets, and rich in-page navigation. Simon tests this technique by piping an obfuscated Python exploit from copy.fail into gpt-5.5 via his llm CLI tool, successfully prompting the model to generate a fully styled, interactive HTML explanation of the code.

AI Reddit — 2026-05-16#

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GitHub Copilot’s sudden transition to usage-based billing has resulted in an effective 4x price hike for some power users, triggering a massive wave of cancellations as developers abandon the platform for tools like Cursor or Codex. Amidst the corporate chaos, an open-source community fork called Zoo Code has quickly emerged to replace the beloved but dying Roo Code extension. On the security frontier, elite researchers just used Anthropic’s Mythos AI to completely bypass Apple’s multi-billion dollar M5 memory integrity enforcement in just five days, proving that frontier models are fundamentally altering the timeline of vulnerability research.

AI Reddit — 2026-06-03#

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The community is in absolute uproar over GitHub Copilot’s new token-based billing changes, which have left enterprise and solo developers alike burning through their monthly AI credits in a matter of days. Even worse, developers discovered that Copilot is still charging AI credits when using “Bring Your Own Key” (BYOK) configurations, meaning users are paying GitHub for requests routed directly to DeepSeek or Claude via their own paid API keys. This has triggered a massive exodus, with frustrated developers actively migrating to Kilo Code, Cursor, and raw DeepSeek setups to regain control of their wallets and workflows.

Simon Willison — 2026-06-16#

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The meatiest topic today is Simon’s sharp criticism of the export controls placed on Claude Fable 5. He connects the dots between a press report and security expert Katie Moussouris to point out the absurdity of penalizing an AI model for successfully fixing security vulnerabilities, which is a core feature of cyberdefense.

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The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense Simon strongly criticizes the US export controls placed on Claude Fable 5, citing security expert Katie Moussouris. The so-called “jailbreak” that triggered the ban was merely researchers asking the model to “fix this code” after it had refused a prompt to “review the code for security issues”. Simon argues that banning models for executing the “find, fix, and test loop” fundamentally misunderstands how AI assists in defensive security, effectively penalizing a model for fixing bugs.

Simon Willison — 2026-06-22#

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Simon’s success in porting a PyTorch machine learning model to a browser-based WebGPU application entirely through “vibe coding” highlights a fascinating shift in developer workflows. It demonstrates how autonomous agents like Claude Code can now bridge significant gaps in domain knowledge, allowing developers to orchestrate the deployment of complex client-side AI tools while actively writing code for entirely different primary projects.

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Porting the Moebius 0.2B image inpainting model to run in the browser with Claude Code · Source Simon successfully ported the Moebius 0.2B lightweight image inpainting framework to run locally in the browser, relying purely on “vibe coding” with Claude Code. While waiting for Codex Desktop to complete mid-sized refactors for a new Datasette table UI, he instructed Claude in a terminal window to convert the original PyTorch model to ONNX, publish the 1.24GB converted weights to Hugging Face, and build a user interface hosted on GitHub Pages. To prevent the application from downloading the massive 1.3GB model on every single page load, he pointed a Claude subagent at a Whisper Web demo to successfully implement browser caching via the CacheStorage API. The core takeaway is the impressive capability of Opus 4.8 to act as a full-stack ML engineer—handling format conversion, model deployment, and front-end development—proving that heavy client-side AI is feasible today if users tolerate the initial download. After completing the project without writing a single line of code himself, Simon used Claude.ai to study his newly generated repository and gain a deeper technical understanding of how ONNX files bundle computation graphs and model weights together.

AI Reddit — 2026-06-30#

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The biggest shockwave today hit the Anthropic ecosystem, starting with the Trump administration abruptly lifting export controls on the highly anticipated Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models. However, this monumental news was quickly overshadowed by a massive community controversy after developers reverse-engineered Claude Code and discovered that recent versions secretly embedded proxy and timezone checks to detect Chinese users, sparking fierce debates over embedded spyware and fundamental violations of user trust.

AI Reddit — Week of 2026-06-27 to 2026-07-03#

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The defining theme this week is the community grappling with the reality of frontier model gating and aggressive government oversight. Anthropic’s Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models finally saw their export controls lifted, but they arrived heavily lobotomized by hyper-sensitive classifiers that silently refuse benign coding and medical tasks. As users realize that un-nerfed “Mythos-class” models may never be globally accessible, there is a massive architectural pivot away from relying on black-box cloud magic toward building deterministic, local Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystems.