Simon Willison — 2026-06-21#

Highlight#

The major news today is the first release candidate for sqlite-utils v4, which officially absorbs the battle-tested sqlite-migrate package and introduces nested transactions. It’s a significant maturation for one of Simon’s core data tools, streamlining the developer experience by bringing schema evolution directly into the main library.

Posts#

sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions Simon dropped the first release candidate for sqlite-utils v4, adding built-in database migrations and a db.atomic() API for nested transactions. The migrations system is deliberately small, offering no reverse migrations, and relies on a design already proven in his LLM CLI project. As a major release, it includes several backwards-incompatible changes—such as defaulting floating-point types to the correct SQLite REAL type, and requiring db.view() instead of db.table() for accessing views—so he is asking the community to test it via uvx or pip.

Simon Willison — Week of 2026-06-18 to 2026-06-25#

Highlight of the Week#

This week’s absolute standout is the launch of the datasette-apps plugin, which fundamentally transforms how we build micro-applications over local databases. By utilizing tightly constrained iframe sandboxes and Content-Security-Policy headers, developers and LLMs alike can safely run custom HTML/JS interfaces against a persistent Datasette backend. It brilliantly merges Simon’s ongoing experiments with AI-assisted “vibe coding” and robust security architectures into a core ecosystem feature, effectively bridging the gap between Claude Artifacts and secure data environments.