Simon Willison — 2026-05-19#

Highlight#

Simon’s annotated PyCon US 2026 lightning talk provides a sharp, insightful retrospective on the “November 2025 inflection point,” identifying exactly when coding agents became reliable daily drivers and laptop-grade local models started wildly overperforming. It is a quintessential Willison post that perfectly frames the recent tectonic shifts in AI developer tooling.

Posts#

[The last six months in LLMs in five minutes] · Source Simon shares his annotated slides from a PyCon US 2026 lightning talk summarizing the past six months of LLM developments. He zeroes in on two main themes: coding agents crossing the threshold from “often-work” to “mostly-work” driven by Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards, and the astonishing capability of local models like the 20.9GB Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Gemma 4. The post also tracks the recent surge of “Claws” (personal AI assistants running locally on Mac Minis) and features his ongoing “pelican riding a bicycle” SVG visual benchmark to compare models.