Flux
Quoting Sean Lynch

Quoting Sean Lynch

The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...] Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win. — Sean Lynch, comment on Hacker News Tags: model-context-protocol, llms, ai, generative-ai, skills

Simon Willison's Weblog
Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette

Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette

Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I'm going to expand on that a little bit here to provide the why. The TL;DR Datasette Apps are self-contained HTML+JavaScript applications that run in a tightly constrained <iframe> sandbox hosted on your Datasette application. They can use JavaScript to run read-only SQL queries against data in Datasette, and can run write queries too…

Simon Willison's Weblog
This Week in AI: Fable 5, the Clone Wave, and Uber’s AI Reality Check

This Week in AI: Fable 5, the Clone Wave, and Uber’s AI Reality Check

This week, egghead.io cofounder John Lindquist joined host YK Sugi, founder of CS Dojo and developer experience manager at Eventual, to cover the latest AI news. First on the agenda was the contested release of Claude Fable 5. They also examined the financial shifts reshaping the technology industry, including the rising costs associated with agentic […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
datasette-acl 0.6a0

datasette-acl 0.6a0

Release: datasette-acl 0.6a0 This release expands datasette-acl from table-only permissions toward a general resource-sharing system. Alex Garcia did most of the work for this release - we're fleshing out the plugin that will allow multi-user Datasette instances finely grained control over who can access which resources within Datasette. Tags: datasette, alex-garcia

Simon Willison's Weblog
GLM-5.2 is probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM

GLM-5.2 is probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM

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 releases, this is 753B parameter, 1.51TB monster - with 40 active parameters (Mixture of Experts). GLM-5.2 is a text input only model - Z.ai have a separate vision family most recently represented by GLM-5V-Turbo, but that one isn't open weights. GLM-5.2 has a 1 million token…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Charity Majors

Quoting Charity Majors

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 went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable and regenerable, practically overnight. — Charity Majors, AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less Tags: charity-majors, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog
The Case Against Building Your Own Agent Platform

The Case Against Building Your Own Agent Platform

You know the meeting. The board wants an AI agent strategy by end of quarter. Someone on the leadership team has read a McKinsey report. You’ve been voluntold to build the platform. The slide deck says “AI-native.” The acceptance criteria are vague. Somebody mentions LangGraph, and somebody else says, “We’ll just wrap it ourselves.” You […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
<click-to-play> — a still that plays

<click-to-play> — a still that plays

Tool: &lt;click-to-play&gt; — a still that plays A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup: &lt;click-to-play&gt; &lt;a href="URL to GIF"&gt; &lt;img src="URL to first frame" alt="..."&gt; &lt;/a&gt; &lt;/click-to-play&gt; Into a still frame with a click to play button which loads the GIF on demand. For when you don't want big GIFs to be loaded unless people want to play them. Here's an example that demonstrates the new row editing tools in Datasette - in fact I built this…

Simon Willison's Weblog
NetNewsWire Status

NetNewsWire Status

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, first released in 2002 and made open source in 2018. I've been using it on Mac and iPhone for several years now and I'm finding it indispensable. Via Lobste.rs Tags: brent-simmons, netnewswire, open-source

Simon Willison's Weblog
datasette 1.0a34

datasette 1.0a34

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 delete are also available as action items on the row page. The inspiration for this feature - which is long overdue - was Datasette Agent. I added SQL write support to that the other day which highlighted how absurd it was that you could insert and edit ties via the chat interface but…

Simon Willison's Weblog