Simon WillisonOpen source developer building tools to help journalists, archivists, librarians and others analyze, explore and publish their data. https://datasette.io and many other #projects.
Simon WillisonThe CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!
This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/the-world-factbook/
Simon WillisonAstral (the VC-backed company behind the popular open source Python tools uv, ruff and ty) have unveiled the first hints at their business model today - pyx, a private package registry for companies that use Python
My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/13/pyx/
Simon WillisonGitHub Codespaces provides a free web-based development environment backed by a Linux container... and it turns out it also includes a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable that provides free API access to the GitHub Models collection of LLMs
... here it's running my LLM CLI utility https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/13/codespaces-llm/
Simon WillisonNew release of my LLM command-line tool and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models - includes support for the GPT-5 model family and improvements to how tool calling works - you can now save multiple tool configurations in a template! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/11/llm-027/
Simon WillisonQwen3-4B-Thinking (a 4GB download) just became the first model I've tested to directly push back against my pelican riding a bicycle test, calling it "oddly specific and completely unrealistic" and saying "this request violates physics and biology"
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/10/qwen3-4b/
Simon WillisonI gave a talk on Wednesday at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup about prompt injection, MCP security and the lethal trifecta. Here are the annotated slides from my presentation, including notes on my weird hobby of trying to coin or amplify new terms of art https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/9/bay-area-ai/
Simon WillisonIn further lethal trifecta news, here's a newly described attack against Cursor when combined with a Jira MCP https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/9/when-a-jira-ticket-can-steal-your-secrets/
Simon WillisonI gave a talk on Wednesday at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup about prompt injection, MCP security and the lethal trifecta. Here are the annotated slides from my presentation, including notes on my weird hobby of trying to coin or amplify new terms of art https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/9/bay-area-ai/
Simon WillisonHere's a good TikTok from @cfiesler@hci.social about the emotional impact the loss of GPT-4o is having on some of its users https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey/video/7536223372485709086
Simon WillisonSam Altman just announced a change in policy, GPT-4o will be coming back, at least for Plus ($20/month) users https://x.com/sama/status/1953893841381273969
Simon WillisonOne of the surprises for me from the GPT-5 launch yesterday is how OpenAI removed access to older models (like GPT-4o) for most ChatGPT users at the same time as they rolled out the new model. I wrote about how that's been playing out here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/8/surprise-deprecation-of-gpt-4o/
Simon WillisonHere's a good TikTok from @cfiesler@hci.social about the emotional impact the loss of GPT-4o is having on some of its users https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey/video/7536223372485709086
Simon WillisonOne of the surprises for me from the GPT-5 launch yesterday is how OpenAI removed access to older models (like GPT-4o) for most ChatGPT users at the same time as they rolled out the new model. I wrote about how that's been playing out here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/8/surprise-deprecation-of-gpt-4o/