Simon Willison — 2026-04-09#

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Today’s most substantive update is the release of asgi-gzip 0.3, which serves as a great practical reminder of the hidden risks in automated maintenance workflows. A silently failing GitHub Action caused his library to miss a crucial upstream Starlette fix for Server-Sent Events (SSE) compression, which ended up breaking a new Datasette feature in production.

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[asgi-gzip 0.3] · Source Simon released an update to asgi-gzip after a production deployment of a new Server-Sent Events (SSE) feature for Datasette ran into trouble. The root cause was datasette-gzip incorrectly compressing event/text-stream responses. The library relies on a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow to port updates from Starlette, but the action had stopped running and missed Starlette’s upstream fix for this exact issue. By running the workflow and integrating the fix, both datasette-gzip and asgi-gzip now handle SSE responses correctly.

Simon Willison — 2026-04-04#

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Simon highlights a staggering growth in developer activity on GitHub, pointing to massive recent surges in both commit volume and GitHub Actions usage. This brief but potent link post captures the sheer scale of how rapidly AI-assisted programming and automated workflows are accelerating platform activity.

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[Quoting Kyle Daigle] · Source Simon shares a striking quote from GitHub COO Kyle Daigle that reveals an explosive surge in overall platform activity. Commit rates have jumped to 275 million per week, which is on pace for 14 billion this year compared to just 1 billion total commits in 2025. Additionally, GitHub Actions usage has skyrocketed to 2.1 billion minutes in just the current week alone, up from 1 billion minutes per week in 2025 and 500 million in 2023. This massive scale-up highlights the unprecedented velocity at which code is currently being generated, integrated, and tested across the developer ecosystem.

Simon Willison — Week of 2026-04-04 to 2026-04-10#

Highlight of the Week#

Anthropic’s decision to delay the general release of their highly capable Claude Mythos model under “Project Glasswing” marks a significant turning point in the AI industry. The move underscores a massive shift in frontier model capabilities, as models evolve from generating text to autonomously chaining multiple minor vulnerabilities into sophisticated exploits, requiring a new level of security safeguards before release.