The 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 simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/t...

Two new speech-to-text models (similar to Whisper) from Mistral today - one of them is API-only, the other is a 8.9GB Apache-2.0 licensed open weights model for "realtime" transcription. They're both very good! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/v...

I've been experimenting with distributing Go binaries as wheels on PyPI so you can execute them without installing them first using commands like "uvx sqlite-scanner ~/Downloads" - I wrote sqlite-scanner in Go I built go-to-wheel to help implement this pattern simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/4/d...

A few notes on OpenAI's new Codex macOS Electron app - I've had a few days of preview access. I had fun poking around in the SQLite database it uses for scheduled Automations! simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/2/i...

My laptop got its photo in the NYT! (There's a photo of me later on in the story too) www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/t...

New TIL: running OpenClaw in Docker on my Mac - this is an officially documented path but there were still a few things that caught me out, hence my TIL til.simonwillison.net/llms/opencla...

@genmon.fyi my current favorite "you can just do things" is a bit of a stretch, but apparently you can just build a successful software company for 20 years then use the proceeds to start a theater in Baltimore (for "research") and give the space away to artists for free bmoreart.com/2024/09/the-...

I wrote about Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw and Moltbook, the fascinating, weird and sometimes even useful social network for digital assistants to swap tips and gossip with each other simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...

I appreciated Chris Ashworth's TikTok thoughts on Claude Code. As someone who works in the arts he's a a natural generative AI skeptic - he builds QLab, the theater sound/lighting automation software www.tiktok.com/@chris_ashwo... More of my notes here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/...

I wrote about a localStorage trick I've been using to add dynamic per-user features to my blog despite it being served behind a 15 minute Cloudflare cache meaning everyone gets the exact same HTML simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/28/...

The latest entrant in the coding-agent-constructed web browsers is here, this one by @emsh.cat, and it's REALLY impressive - 3 days of development, 20,000 lines of Rust, no Cargo dependencies and it renders HTML+CSS extremely well simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...

Notes and a pelican for the new Kimi K2.5 - a multi-modal (image input) model from Moonshot AI which also claims a "self-directed agent swarm paradigm" simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/27/...

OpenAI shipped a huge upgrade to ChatGPT Code Interpreter and failed to document it anywhere, even in the release notes - but ChatGPT can now pip/npm install packages and run code in Python, Node.js, Bash, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++! simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/26/...

Who would like to look at some fluffy chicken butts?

I had a fascinating conversation with Wilson Lin about FastRender, the browser rendering engine he built with the help of 2,000+ coding agents over the past few weeks. It's 47m on YouTube or you can read my highlights here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/23/...

Qwen released a new Apache 2.0 licensed text-to-speech model, with full voice cloning abilities, and it's really effective - my notes from trying it out here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/22/...

TIL on how I use Claude Code on my iPhone with GitHub Pages to preview Claude's changes while it's still working on them til.simonwillison.net/claude-code/...

A few quick notes on the Claude "soul document" that was released by Anthropic today under a CC0 public domain license - it's a huge 35,000 token essay used as part of Claude's training to instill core values and help define Claude's personality simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/21/...

This is great - it's about time someone updated the discourse on LLM energy usage to reflect that coding agents use massively more prompts than occasional questions to ChatGPT Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher

Having compiled and run the web browser that Cursor built in a couple of weeks using mostly a giant fleet of coding agents I'm actually very impressed by it - there are rendering glitches but the renders it produces are surprisingly usable for a few-week-old project simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/...

Bay Area musician LaRussell has been doing a series of collaborations with local schools turning around full music videos and they're pretty amazing, here's the latest with San Leandro High School www.tiktok.com/@larussellgc...

New interview: @simonwillison.net shares his technical blogging experiences and advice writethatblog.substack.com/p/simon-will...

Honestly this works for everything “I want to trap hungry 19c ghosts in jars to help us with historical research” ✅ “Please read our holiday card; we got a hungry ghost to write it this year” ❌

Wrote up my first impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's new general purpose agent released today for $100+/month subscribers as part of their macOS desktop app simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/12/...

Inspired by @simonwillison.net work on gisthost I created snippethost - rendering HTML directly from GitLab Snippets in the browser! marco.ninja/blog/posts/2...

I will never understand the decision making process that leads to a company throwing away their archives like this, like how far gone from understanding anything about how the internet works do you have to be in order to make a decision like this? What, you think old pages are /expensive/?

Thanks @simonwillison.net, always enjoy your content. I also really like HTML tools. Thank you for all the resources! Was inspired to share them: www.briangershon.com/blog/make-to...

Sprites.dev by @fly.io is a very cool new thing: it solves two of my pet problems at once, developer sandbox environments for coding agents and a JSON API for executing untrusted code I wrote more here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/s...

Sprites.dev by @fly.io is a very cool new thing: it solves two of my pet problems at once, developer sandbox environments for coding agents and a JSON API for executing untrusted code I wrote more here: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/9/s...

An important tip to improve your 2026

It's started! The 2026 #kakapo breeding season is under way, with the first nest found on Whenua Hou today. Pearl is on two eggs. #conservation #parrots #birds

I joined the Oxide and Friends annual predictions podcast episode this week - here are my 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for AI and LLMs (and Kākāpō parrots) simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/8/l...

Software engineers are losing their minds over Claude Code and agents. Campaigns shouldn’t shrug. The story isn't “AI can code”, it's AI can do knowledge work, and campaigns are mostly knowledge work. matthodges.com/posts/2026-0...

The dog is mysteriously wet

I wrote a photo essay with 20+ of my favourite tech museums in the world, and tried to figure out what makes a great museum in the process. I am very curious what tech museums you like – and why! aresluna.org/fav-tech-mus...

The first Monday of the new year means... predictions! Thrilled to announce that @simonwillison.net will again be joining @ahl.bsky.social and me for 1- 3- and 6-year predictions. Bring your own predictions and join us today at a special time: 4p Pacific! discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?e...

The underlying data for this is available as CSV files with open CORS headers, so I had some fun loading it into Datasette Lite and querying it with WebAssembly SQLite simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/2/m...

On a New Years Day dumpling crawl around Fremont with @simonwillison.net for his birthday

I forked the wonderful gistpreview.github.io to create gisthost.github.io - here's what I changed in my fork: simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/1/g...

Made lemon pigs! 🍋 🐷

Here's my enormous round-up of everything we learned about LLMs in 2025 - the third in my annual series of reviews of the past twelve months simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/... This year it's divided into 26 sections! This is the table of contents:

Looks like OpenAI "Codex cloud" was quietly rebranded to "Codex web" at some point in the last ~48 hours I use them via native apps so I wanted Anthropic to rebrand "Claude Code on the web" to "Claude Code Cloud", didn't expect OpenAI to go the other direction! simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/...

This is true and I was the only one on set excited about it (and playing the song on my phone to blank stares)

This thread of four tweets offers a neat mental model for working with coding agents

If like me you have a mental model that SQLite doesn't accept outside contributions you should update it, I just got called out by D. Richard Hipp for spreading that misinformation in a comment on Hacker News simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/29/...

Just watched the new Knives Out and I think it's really important you know that the scene in the Seminary's Gym is filmed in the same place Rick Astley filmed the music video for Never Gonna Give You Up. I saw the window tracery and immediately made my friends pause the film so I could tell them.

Today in very niche projects: I built a page showing the latest versions of all of the official GitHub Actions (actions/setup-python@v6 etc) so I can point Claude Code and friends at it when they're writing workflows for me simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/28/...

My favorite advice for blogging remains that you should hit publish while you are still actively unhappy with what you have written, because the only alternative is a huge folder full of drafts and never publishing anything at all

Thought of a fun analogy between AI training data and Pluribus but it's a spoiler so I had to blog it with a spoiler tag simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/27/...

Yeah, I'd be pretty furious if I got spam email from some "AI agent" thanking me for my contributions too I dug into what happened here, turns out it's an experiment called "AI Village" which unleashes all sorts of other junk emails on the world: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/...