Flux
The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Winchester Mystery House

The following article originally appeared on Drew Breunig’s blog and is being republished here with the author’s permission. In 1998, Eric S. Raymond published the founding text of open source software development, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. In it, he detailed two methods of building software: The bazaar model was enabled by the internet, which […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast

Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines. It's available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Here are my highlights from our conversation, with relevant links. The November inflection point Software engineers as bellwethers for other information workers Writing code on my phone Responsible vibe coding Dark Factories and StrongDM The bottleneck has…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Gemma 4: Byte for byte, the most capable open models

Gemma 4: Byte for byte, the most capable open models

Gemma 4: Byte for byte, the most capable open models Four new vision-capable Apache 2.0 licensed reasoning LLMs from Google DeepMind, sized at 2B, 4B, 31B, plus a 26B-A4B Mixture-of-Experts. Google emphasize "unprecedented level of intelligence-per-parameter", providing yet more evidence that creating small useful models is one of the hottest areas of research right now. They actually label the two smaller models as E2B and E4B for "Effective" parameter size. The system card explains: The…

Simon Willison's Weblog
The Toolkit Pattern

The Toolkit Pattern

This is the third article in a series on agentic engineering and AI-driven development. Read part one here, part two here, and look for the next article on April 15 on O’Reilly Radar. The toolkit pattern is a way of documenting your project’s configuration so that any AI can generate working inputs from a plain-English description. […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
March 2026 sponsors-only newsletter

March 2026 sponsors-only newsletter

I just sent the March edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: More agentic engineering patterns Streaming experts with MoE models on a Mac Model releases in March Vibe porting Supply chain attacks against PyPI and NPM Stuff I shipped What I'm using, March 2026 edition And a couple of museums Here's a copy of the February newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month…

Simon Willison's Weblog
The Model You Love Is Probably Just the One You Use

The Model You Love Is Probably Just the One You Use

The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Ask 10 developers which LLM they’d recommend and you’ll get 10 different answers—and almost none of them are based on objective comparison. What you’ll get instead is a reflection of the models they happen to have access to, the […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML