Notices by Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net)

Uber reportedly now caps coding agents at $1,500/month per employee per tool - seems sensible to me, but it's also an interesting hint at the value Uber thinks these tools are providing https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/3/uber-caps-usage/

Just launched Datasette Apps - a plugin for Datasette that lets you host full HTML+JS apps in an iframe sandbox that can query your database and do interesting things with your data
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/18/datasette-apps/

Think of this as Claude Artifacts reimagined for Datasette - you get all the power of artifacts but with a JSON API to a full relational database, allowing your HTML+JS apps to access and store data in all shapes and sizes

Lots more information in this post on the Datasette project blog, including details on our live demo and uv one-liners you can use to try this out on your own machine https://datasette.io/blog/2026/datasette-apps/

It's now possible to compile Python extensions (C, C++, Rust etc) to WebAssembly and distribute them through PyPI such that Pyodide can install them directly https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/13/publishing-wasm-wheels/

Notes on Claude Opus 4.8, which Anthropic call "a modest but tangible improvement" - plus pelicans riding bicycles for each of the five different thinking efforts https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/28/claude-opus-4-8/

New TIL: I figured out how to use my LLM CLI tool in a shebang line, which means you can write executable scripts in English, or hook up more complex scripts with a snippet of YAML template - https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/llm-shebang

Wrote about today's GitLab restructuring / "workforce reduction" announcement, and ended up digging around in version control for both the GitLab and the 37signals public employee handbooks to help illustrate my thoughts https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/gitlab-act-2/

I added a new feature to my blog (built entirely on my phone with Claude code for web) that imports my iNaturalist photos and adds them to my site's overall timeline https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/2/sightings/

New on Niche Museums: the John M. Mossman Lock Collection, available to view by appointment only at The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York https://www.niche-museums.com/118

Got excited about a brand new PostgreSQL 18 feature (for simulating production query plan statistics locally), posted about it on the SQLite forum... and got a reply from D. Richard Hipp within minutes that SQLite has had the same ability for years https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/9/production-query-plans-without-production-data/

I started a new section of my Agentic Engineering guide for annotated versions of prompts I've used for projects - the first is a prompt I used to have Claude Code for web build me a web UI for compressing GIFs using a WebAssembly build of Gifsicle https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/gif-optimization/

New term of art is brewing: "Claw" as the noun for OpenClaw-like agent systems, AI agents that generally run on personal hardware, communicate via messaging protocols and can both act on direct instructions and schedule tasks https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/claws/

On the @oxidecomputer and friends podcast last month we (primary credit @ahl) coined the term "Deep Blue" for the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to LLMs right now https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/deep-blue/

Short musings on "cognitive debt" - I'm seeing this in my own work, where excessive unreviewed AI-generated code leads me to lose a firm mental model of what I've built, which then makes it harder to confidently make future decisions https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/cognitive-debt/

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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/the-world-factbook/

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 https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/21/claudes-new-constitution/

Rob Pike got spammed by "AI Village", a poorly considered experiment in autonomous AI agents which has been sending out unsolicited emails to people (including NGOs and journalists) since April - I wrote up some notes on what happened and how it all works: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/

Blogged some notes on the new ChatGPT Images model that launched today https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/16/new-chatgpt-images/

Just pushed a new release of my LLM Python library and CLI tool for interacting with Large Language Models, adding support for GPT 5.1 and GPT 5.2 plus a few smaller bug fixes https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/changelog.html#v0-28