Chronological feed of everything captured from Simon Willison.
This week's edition of my email newsletter features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide simonw.substack.com/p/gpt-55-cha...
DeepSeek V4 just dropped - two models, Flash and Pro, both benchmarking well, decent pelicans and prices that put them both as the cheapest in their respective categories by a solid margin simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/24/...
I need to build a better one but they're all here for the moment: simonwillison.net/tags/pelican...
I wrote about that here simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/...
I have a new camera and I have been saying "I hope we see a bird" every day for the past week
OK this piece by @reckless.bsky.social about why AI is unpopular among most people (anyone who's not inflicted with "software brain") is just solid gold from start to finish
GPT-5.5 is out but not yet in the OpenAI API - but in the ongoing battle with Anthropic over OpenClaw OpenAI made their Codex tool's private backend API a semi-approved mechanism... and that one has GPT-5.5... So I used it to draw some pelicans simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/...
It's a text model outputting SVG code to draw a pelican, which is a completely different challenge from a dedicated image model creating an image. Here's the code it had to write: gist.github.com/simonw/a6168...
I vibe coded a web UI to LiteParse by LlamaIndex, a neat open source library for extracting text from annoying layouts PDFs simonw.github.io/liteparse/ More about how I built it on my blog: simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/23/...
I didn't use any skills when building this, honestly didn't know it had a dark mode at all!
Definitely
Apparently my blog is mostly about token pricing now, here are some notes on the big changes GitHub Copilot just announced, including pausing new signups entirely simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/...
I'm trying to get clarity on that now x.com/simonw/statu...
And raccoons with ham radios!
Thanks, corrected my post and linked to windsurf.com/blog/windsur...
They put it back simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/...
So keep the $20/month plan but reduce the usage limits on it - don't ditch that pricing level entirely
I'd be interested to know that too - my instinct is that it would be FAR less anger-inducing than locking $20/month people out of the product entirely, but maybe I'm bad at guessing human emotional reactions to this kind of thing
I think they would still be a LOT happier than being told they couldn't use the tool at all unless they shelled out $100/month If you're a programmer who uses Claude all day then sure, usage limits are a big problem - but plenty of potential Claude Code users don't need it for a full day of work
On my blog I give the example of journalists who might use Claude Code once or twice a week to help them with some data analysis - that should fit the $20/month plan just fine simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/...
The new Qwen3.6-27B just gave me definitely the best pelican riding a bicycle I've had from a 16.8GB model file! simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/...
I came up with a somewhat foolish new benchmark for testing image generation models, to exercise the new ChatGPT Images 2.0: "Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio" simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/21/...
Must be! I guess they figured that raccoons in urban dumpsters are less likely to be engaged in the hobby
This is so confusing. Did Anthropic really just drop Claude Code from their $20/month plan? Why would they do that through a pricing page update without making a proper announcement? Plus, $20/month still gets you Cowork, which is really just Claude Code wearing a non-threatening hat!
Someone from Anthropic says this, which I do not find clarifying at all twitter.com/theamolavasa...
Images on Bluesky seem broken to me, trying again
Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach—we have new AI and security tracks this year simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/17/...
The event is next month - talks are Friday 15th to Sunday 17th of May, with the date before that of tutorials and two days afterwards of sprints Californians are notoriously last-minute planners so I know that's enough time to decide to come join us!
Since Anthropic publish their system prompts we can generate a diff between Claude Opus 4.6 and 4.7 - here are my notes on what's changed simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/18/...
Yeah, I mention the lack of tool definitions at the bottom of my post
I upgraded my Claude token counter tool to compare different models and Opus 4.7 appears to use 1.46x times the tokens for text and up to 3x the tokens for images - it's priced the same as Opus 4.6 on a per-token basis so this is actually a pretty big price bump simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/20/...
New TIL on fetching data from a Datasette instance into Google Sheets using importdata(), named custom functions or Google Apps Script til.simonwillison.net/google-sheet...
Important to note: that 3x increase for images is entirely due to Opus 4.7 being able to handle higher resolutions. I tried that again with a 682x318 pixel image and it took 314 tokens with Opus 4.7 and 310 with Opus 4.6, so effectively the same cost.
See follow-up comment, token usage is indeed the same for same-sized images below the new resolution boost bsky.app/profile/simo...
I counted them with the official claude token counting API, using this interface I built for it tools.simonwillison.net/claude-token...
Please don't use an AI reply bot here, especially not one that includes follow-up questions in those replies
code update
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code update
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code update
code update