Chronological feed of everything captured from Simon Willison.
bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
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...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
I need to build a better one but they're all here for the moment: simonwillison.net/tags/pelican...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
I wrote about that here simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
I have a new camera and I have been saying "I hope we see a bird" every day for the past week
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
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
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
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...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 24
I didn't use any skills when building this, honestly didn't know it had a dark mode at all!
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 23
Definitely
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
I'm trying to get clarity on that now x.com/simonw/statu...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
And raccoons with ham radios!
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
Thanks, corrected my post and linked to windsurf.com/blog/windsur...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
They put it back simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/22/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
So keep the $20/month plan but reduce the usage limits on it - don't ditch that pricing level entirely
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
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
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
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
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / 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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / 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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
Must be! I guess they figured that raccoons in urban dumpsters are less likely to be engaged in the hobby
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
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!
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
Someone from Anthropic says this, which I do not find clarifying at all twitter.com/theamolavasa...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 22
Images on Bluesky seem broken to me, trying again
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
Join us at PyCon US 2026 in Long Beach—we have new AI and security tracks this year simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/17/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
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!
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
Yeah, I mention the lack of tool definitions at the bottom of my post
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
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/...
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bluesky_post / simonw / 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...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
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.
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
See follow-up comment, token usage is indeed the same for same-sized images below the new resolution boost bsky.app/profile/simo...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
I counted them with the official claude token counting API, using this interface I built for it tools.simonwillison.net/claude-token...
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bluesky_post / simonw / Apr 20
Please don't use an AI reply bot here, especially not one that includes follow-up questions in those replies
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github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update
github_star / simonw / Apr 18
automerge-repo. Stars: 677
github_star / simonw / Apr 18
A React component for building Web forms from JSON Schema.. Stars: 15739
github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update
github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update
github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update
github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update
github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update
github_star / simonw / Apr 18
DOMPurify - a DOM-only, super-fast, uber-tolerant XSS sanitizer for HTML, MathML and SVG. DOMPurify works with a secure default, but offers a lot of configurability and hooks. Demo:. Stars: 16881
github_star / simonw / Apr 18
latest ionospheric data from glotec. Stars: 3
github_star / simonw / Apr 18
Tools for editing Shapefile, GeoJSON, TopoJSON and CSV files. Stars: 4092
github_star / simonw / Apr 18
Migrate a project from Poetry/Pipenv/pip-tools/pip to uv package manager. Stars: 1114
github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update
github_push / simonw / Apr 18
code update