I've been a serious CleanShot X power user for several years and only just noticed the highlighting feature built in to the annotation tools. It detects text and cleanly highlights in a straight line like you're guiding a highlighter with a ruler. bsky.app/profile/jbra...

That said, LLMs exhibit emergent behaviors and continue to surprise even the people developing them with what they can do. So, also make sure to experiment with them. Give them a shot at something you expect them to flop at and see how they do.

I'm starting to gather "common misconceptions about LLMs". This is an interesting one that I wouldn't have expected to find in the preamble to the latest TIOBE Index. An LLM is a sophisticated next-word generation system, not an OLAP database. It's completely ill-equipped to answer this question.

I'm seeing this conversation everywhere right now. We're in a moment where it is hitting a lot of people at once: the LLM models and harnesses have gotten really good If we can use them to produce most of the code we ship, how do existing processes like code review keep up?

RIP Tony Hoare, thanks for quicksort, one of the all-time greats blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2026/03/tony...

When did GitHub up the cap on video upload size? I used to get errors on videos larger than 10MB. Recently I've noticed I can upload videos in at least the 30-35MB range.

If you're already using mise to manage tool versions and environment variables, then consider using mise tasks as well — it's a great way to wrap up common workflow commands into short, easy-to-access tasks. www.visualmode.dev/add-mise-tas...

I feel so inspired to improve my own (micro)blog tooling every time I spend even 5 minutes on @simonwillison.net’s site. E.g., here is a tag that was linked to in the body of a post. It has its own description and then a bunch of posts that were tagged with it -> simonwillison.net/tags/novembe...

"Whatever AI you are using right now is going to be the worst AI you will ever use." That's from @emollick.bsky.social in mid-2023 while writing Co-Intelligence, well before models like Opus 4.5/6, Gemini 3, etc. were released.

In a lot of ways, this feels like an awful time to be trying to break into content creation, both due to over-saturation and the ways that AI is changing discoverability and consumption habits. Not to mention the way AI flattens the effort required to produce "content".

I’m caught somewhere between my prestige TV era and my reality TV era

ooh, the Claude app got first-class support for follow-up questions from the LLM

Very nice and very subtle Linear feature I noticed this week: When I'm delivering the feature described by an issue, I often post a quick video as a comment on the issue, demonstrating how it works. The subtle feature is that Linear *automatically subtitles the videos*.

I'm amused by the serendipity of finding myself writing a TIL about timezone handling on the day of the DST cutover. github.com/jbranchaud/t...

I'm finding "AI-exposure" to be a useful term and metric for thinking about what kinds of jobs will be more or less impacted by AI. Software has lots of AI-exposure, bartending very little. I'm sure it originates somewhere else, but I heard it in this study --> www.anthropic.com/research/lab...

Linear feature request: another `copy` option for issues that creates a markdown link with the issue title and URL and then puts it on your clipboard

I’m reading @emollick.bsky.social’s Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI.

A necessary condition of being able to experiment with building my own pieces of LLM and neural network tools is having a sizeable (but not too big) and real-world text to train on. I decided to use my 1700+ TIL repo. Here is how I rolled up all the files. www.visualmode.dev/build-a-smal...

Whether it is for myself when I grab lunch or go for a walk, or for LLM agents, this @scriptkit.com script prompts me for a duration and then invokes caffeinate to keep my computer awake for a set time. Super handy! github.com/jbranchaud/d...

The LLM book I'm reading hand-waved over how Byte Pair Encoding works, so I decided to implement my own naive version to understand it better. I just ran it against a rollup of all (1700+) markdown files in my TIL repo and its cool to see real-world tokens it added to the extended vocabulary.

@simonwillison.net what are your favorite newsletters and who are your favorite people to follow in the AI, LLM, and agentic coding space? I'm interested to find more high-signal stuff to complement what I'm reading from you.

Slowly, painfully becoming a Twilio A2P 10DLC compliance and registration expert.

Did you know your REPL (probably) supports popping open your editor to write or edit longer / more-complex statements? I wrote about it in my latest blog post www.visualmode.dev/an-editor-in...

I'm going to use Sonnet 4.6 over Opus 4.6 as my daily driver this week and see how it does. Will report back.

I'm experimenting with using Cloudflare's R2 to host and serve images for my blogmarks, as well as my actual blog. Cloudflare made this very easy to set up. still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks/235

I've been back on a kick of posting regularly to my blogmarks page 📑 still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks

Woke up at 6:30am to make coffee and watch the gold medal game of olympic men's hockey. Absolutely thrilling game.

Marty Supreme was a fun ride. It had hints of Uncut Gems as just when you thought things were finally starting to go okay, the characters doubled down on impulsive and bad decisions.

clever idea for a course -- the missing semester of computer science these first few things were covered to some extent during my CS degree, but I had to self-learn modern editors, git, shipping code, code quality, etc. missing.csail.mit.edu

Hey Chicagoans, a reminder as we enjoy this week of 60+F weather

I didn’t realize you could do this level of logic, programming, and automation with iOS Shortcuts. www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8xJNKnx/

It's that time of year where I remember the Oscars exist and I try to quickly find time to watch all the best picture nominees.

as someone who keeps open wayyyy too many chrome tabs, this feature for controlling and jumping to the tab with an active audio/video player is so handy

I pulled up this blog to get a quick understanding of word2vec and instead got an illustrated deep dive on a bunch of concepts behind how embeddings and next-word prediction can be trained. Excellent resource. jalammar.github.io/illustrated-...

that warm, fuzzy feeling when your favorite tech company implements those features you just couldn't do without

I've been organizing all of my work with my current client in a Linear project. The level of polish on Linear is astounding. It's the best project management software I've worked with at this point in my career. The collaboration features + GitHub integration make it excellent for dev teams.

One of my favorite "learn a new language" projects has always been building a Markov chain text generator. Part of why this book piques my interest is that LLMs are, in a way, a super advanced version of that.

A client just sent me (and the rest of the team) a copy of Build a Large Language Model (from scratch) by Sebastian Raschka. I look forward to understanding more about what’s going on under the hood of LLM systems.

Interesting research in HBR today about how the productivity boost you can get from AI tools can lead to burnout or general metal exhaustion, something I've noticed in my own work simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/9/a...

Unable to mark a pull request as approved on GitHub right now -- it keeps hanging for 10 seconds and then displaying "Unexpected token '<', "<!DOCTYPE"... is not valid JSON" 🫠 GitHub Status page shows that Pull Requests are degraded at the moment.

send me your best japanese curry recipes

What are y'all using for performance monitoring (APM) for Rails apps these days? Datadog, Sentry, New Relic, something else?

Looks like I've got an early morning tomorrow

hacker news reports that reading books is washed

One of the biggest unlocks for me using a tool like Cursor or Claude Code is being able to ask questions about my codebase. Especially when there are corners of the codebase that I don't know much about. Cursor even highlights parts of files, then I can click into the file to read more.

Linear is incredible, but one small qualm with the flow of the GitHub integration is that an issue isn't marked as "in-progress" until I push it up as a PR. That's usually when I'm mostly done with the feature. Do you have a way of working around this (besides manually changing the status)?

My 9-ball team won the season playoffs last Thursday which gets us another qualification for the Chicago city-wide tournament. Everyone played great. Proud of how I shook an early funk and crushed my match.

I’m reading the fourth book in Keigo Higashino’s Detective Galileo series — Silent Parade.

AMA with Tim Pope in r/vim www.reddit.com/r/vim/s/w2hq...