Flux
It's a big one

It's a big one

This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) 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. Tags: newsletter

Simon Willison's Weblog
russellromney/honker

russellromney/honker

russellromney/honker "Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this: import honker db = honker.open("app.db") emails = db.queue("emails") emails.enqueue({"to": "alice@example.com"}) # Consume (in a worker process) async for job in emails.claim("worker-1"): send(job.payload) job.ack() And Kafka-style…

Simon Willison's Weblog
An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports It turns out the high volume of complaints that Claude Code was providing worse quality results over the past two months was grounded in real problems. The models themselves were not to blame, but three separate issues in the Claude Code harness caused complex but material problems which directly affected users. Anthropic's postmortem describes these in detail. This one in particular stood out to me: On March 26, we shipped a change to clear…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Serving the For You feed

Serving the For You feed

Serving the For You feed One of Bluesky's most interesting features is that anyone can run their own custom "feed" implementation and make it available to other users - effectively enabling custom algorithms that can use any mechanism they like to recommend posts. spacecowboy runs the For You Feed, used by around 72,000 people. This guest post on the AT Protocol blog explains how it works. The architecture is fascinating. The feed is served by a single Go process using SQLite on a "gaming" PC…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web

Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web

LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js. Spatial text parsing Refreshingly, LiteParse doesn't use AI models to do what it does: it's good old-fashioned PDF parsing, falling back to Tesseract OCR (or other pluggable OCR engines) for PDFs that contain images of text…

Simon Willison's Weblog
A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

GPT-5.5 is out. It's available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I've had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it's hard to put into words what's good about it - I ask it to build things and it builds exactly what I ask for! There's one notable omission from today's release - the API: API deployments require different safeguards and we are working closely with partners and customers on…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Maggie Appleton

Quoting Maggie Appleton

[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit. — Maggie Appleton, Gathering Structures (via) Tags: blogging, maggie-appleton

Simon Willison's Weblog
Behavioral Credentials: Why Static Authorization Fails Autonomous Agents

Behavioral Credentials: Why Static Authorization Fails Autonomous Agents

Enterprise AI governance still authorizes agents as if they were stable software artifacts.They are not. An enterprise deploys a LangChain-based research agent to analyze market trends and draft internal briefs. During preproduction review, the system behaves within acceptable bounds: It routes queries to approved data sources, expresses uncertainty appropriately in ambiguous cases, and maintains source […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model Big claims from Qwen about their latest open weight model: Qwen3.6-27B delivers flagship-level agentic coding performance, surpassing the previous-generation open-source flagship Qwen3.5-397B-A17B (397B total / 17B active MoE) across all major coding benchmarks. On Hugging Face Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is 807GB, this new Qwen3.6-27B is 55.6GB. I tried it out with the 16.8GB Unsloth Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M quantized version and llama-server using…

Simon Willison's Weblog