Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; prolific writer on LLMs and practical AI tooling.
Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in size to their previous GLM-5 and GLM-5.1...
What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code...
Tool: <click-to-play> — a still that plays A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup: <click-to-play> <a href="URL to GIF"> <img src="URL to first frame" alt="...">...
NetNewsWire Status I find this inspiring. Brent Simmons retired a year ago, and his retirement project is making one piece of software really, really good - free from any commercial pressure. The software is NetNewsWire...
Release: datasette 1.0a34 Quoting the release notes: The big feature in this alpha is tools to insert, edit and delete rows within the Datasette interface. These features are available on table pages, and edit and...
[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend. — Julia Evans, write for 1 person Tags: writing, julia-evans
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software...
The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the...
Release: luau-wasm 0.1a0 See Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide for details. Tags: lua, webassembly, pyodide
Research: Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column` It would be neat if arbitrary SQL queries in Datasette could be rendered with additional information based on which columns from which tables...
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Well this is nuts: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access...
OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context I built the first version of this tool in December 2024 to try out the then-new OpenAI WebRTC API for interacting with their realtime audio models. Last month...
Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to...
After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive. It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll...
Release: datasette 1.0a33 This alpha is a significant step on the road to a stable 1.0, finally extending the ?_extra= pattern I introduced in Datasette 1.0a3 to cover queries and rows in addition to tables. That...
Release: asyncinject 0.7 I built this utility library to support an asyncio dependency injection pattern a few years ago. I was using it with Datasette and Claude Fable 5 spotted some bugs in the dependency which it...
Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude Big scoop for Maxwell Zeff at Wired: “We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic...
Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...)...
DiffusionGemma Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further...
Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement: The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI But everyone else should have access to it. By definition, this...